Loss Of Self In The City: A Comparative Study On The Urbanizing Migrants In The Tin Flute And The Mud Fish

This thesis focuses on 1947 Governor General's Award winner The Tin Flute and a very popular Chinese novel The Mud Fish. The study compares the two novels in the aspect of descriptions about the urbanizing migrants'living and spiritual condition, and tries to find out the reason of their loss of identity on the way to look for a living.The Canadian novel The Tin Flute is set in the 1940s, and the Chinese novel The Mud Fish is set in the early twenty-first century. With the urbanization rates of the two countries around 40 percent in two different historical periods, the city attracts large numbers of the urbanizing migrants with its prosperity. In the two novels, both cities are posited in the same period of urbanization, and are described as prevailing with consumerism, where opportunities as well as temptations are equally abundant, and where the urbanizing migrants gradually and inevitably lose their self-identity and have their nature distorted. Jean Levesque in The Tin Flute and Gui Rui in The Mud Fish represent the male migrants who give up love, friendship and dignity in pursuit of material success and comfort. Florentine in The Tin Flute and Kou Lan in The Mud Fish represent the female migrants who exchange their body for money and power when they cannot satisfy their needs as other citizens of the cities do. As a vulnerable group, the urbanizing migrants find it more difficult to keep themselves from plummeting into the abyss, since the consumer society itself has become an abyss which is full of endless desires. Ultimately, their pursuit is doomed to end with loss of self-identity and respect in the city.