A Lonely Flag Flutter In Wind

In this dissertation Chen Yingzhen, the Taiwan contemporary writer, and his works are studied as part of Chinese new literature which commenced at the turn of the twentieth century. Viewing from this perspective, we find that, in ideaology, Chen Yingzhen inherits the virtues of Chinese traditional scholars who concern themselves with society and write to benefit the human beings; in literature, he insists that literature serve the people, which has been a trend in China since the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, in Chen's works, he reveals that human nature is twisted and alienated by power, capital, poverty and wars in new environments. So reading between lines of his works, we sense that, as a man of letter with conscience, Chen struggled hard in the pursuit of his own value and ideal in the embarrassed crevice of the times.This dissertation is divided into three chapters which are subdivided into seven sections.Chapter I Influences Exerted by His Childhood.This chapter gives an account of Chen Yingzhen's unusual childhood spent in an age when the Chinese nation is calamity-ridden, which exerts great influence on his literary career. His turbulent childhood leads him in the pursuit of the realization of love, the restoration of human nature, the perfection of human morality. During this period he read Lu Xun's works and accepted the idea that literature should serve the people, and he formed his own view of point in literature, which is human-centred and realistic. Thus, he inherits and further develops the Chinese traditional culture. Based on this fact, we can see that Chen Yingzhen, ideologically and cuturally incorporate Taiwan literature into Chinese literature as a whole, and Chen's works are of great significance both in Taiwan and the mainland.Chapter II Puzzled About Human Nature.This chapter deals with Chen's viewpoint of ideals and values about human nature in three aspects. First, as an idealist, Chen requires the characters in his earlier works to be perfect in morality, and this ideal inevitably conflicts with the reality in Taiwain. This partly accounts for why his works are characterized by depression and sentiment and the characters in them are in a constant state of schizophrenia. In addition to this reason, this conflict results from Chen's class limit as a petty city intellectual and the inevitable failure of idealism owing to the then situations home and abroad. Second, Chen probes into the problem how human nature is twisted and alienated by capital in the multi-national enterprises. Besides, what's more important, he, as a humane intellectual, has a keen understanding of his own position in the industrial society, providing human beings with a real angle of view to be adopted in their observation of the world. Finally, in retrospection to political events, Chen searches for beauty and ugliness contained in human nature, endeavouring to find out the meaning of life and the value of being a man,and the ideal route to retrospection of human nature. According to Chen, a person is aware of the meaning and the value of his life only when he is in a constant state of retrospection.Chapter III Resorting to Love.Chen YingZhen, as a writer with conscience and sense of social responsibility, confronted with the embarrassed crevice of the times, finally chooses to love human beings and his motherland in the hope of struggling against the social reality which is teemed with material desires. On the one hand, his works are filled with humanism and fraternity. In them, he eulogizes real love between small characters living in the lower class, enthusiastically appealing to make up for the hardships suffered in life and rescue the wound of war with love. In so doing, he tries to break out of the crevice of the times. On the other hand, his works are full of patriotism and longings for the reunification of China, which indicates that he considers himself one of the traditional scholars of the Chinese nation and that his ideas are based on Chinese traditional culture. T...