Regretful Travelling

The Sentimental Keynote is one of the characteristics in Yu Dafu's works. It creates a special background for his works and heroes. Meanwhile it shows his writing style, and his artistic characteristics as well. My analysis is as follows.PART 1: The Descriptions.of the Sentimental Keynote and the Superfluous (hero) in His WorksThere are filled with the sentimental atmosphere both in his novels and essays, which forms the writer's sole characteristic-the sentimental keynote. We can see from his works, the Overseas Student worries how to make a contribution to the country as being a patriot and suffers from the death of his wife; the middle-aged man has experienced all the hardships and pains in his life, no matter he is willing or not-Such performance of sentimental keynote has been concentrated on the heroes-"the Superfluous" both in his novels and prose.PART 2: The Aesthetic Significance of Sentimental Keynote1. Art is the symbol of depression. Yu lays a stress on describing the depression of "living" and "sex", and shows the painful experience in human life. The sentimental keynote is the best artistic expression given by the writer.2. The romantic expression. There is a strong sense of subjectiveness in Yu's works. He would like to prefer subjectiveness to objectiveness, prefer experience to observation, and prefer expression to analysis as well. Meanwhile he always pays more attention on the description of natural scenery. The writer would rather show the depressions and pains of his heroes than convey their ideal. He is willing to present emotions of the ordinary people, not to create heroism. That is the typical Schmaltz of Romanticism.PART 3: The performance of Sentimental Keynote1. The inner monologue. It is one of the most effective means in psychological description. It is beneficial to express the complicated mind of human being. Yu is good at using such writing skill and presents the readers the peculiarity of the self-expression in his novels.2. Express one's feeling by describing the natural scenery. More often the writer creates a special background for his hero and shows his inner world of complicated feeling in a sharp relief.3. The title indicates the keynote of the work directly. Sometimes we would know one kinds of schmaltzy information by reading the title itself, a) The title shows the content, such as 《Silver-gray Death》and 《Sink Down》. It tells us the hero must have a tragic fame, b) The title shows the background. For example:《Sun-down》 and 《Dark Night》 . It creates a cool, lone and dark circumstance, among which the hero would tell us the story.4. The Drunk Hero. As an old Chinese saying "how to get rid of depression only drink the wine 'Dukang". In Yu's works drinking is a habit of the heroes, and drunk becomes their schmaltzy peculiarity at the meantime.PART 4: Cause of the Writer's Sentimental KeynoteThere were various causes to form the writer's sentimental writing style, such as the social environment, personal experience, his own personality and the influences come from the foreign art trends as well as the foreign writers. It is no doubt Yu's creation mainly comes from his despondent temperament and the schmaltzy emotion. Otherwise, I am analyzing the affections on the writer by the foreign art trends and the foreign writers, such as the Sentimentalism and Bathetic magazines in Britain, the naturalism in Japan, Theodor storm and Rudlf lindau in German and Turgenev in Russia etc..