Conflict And Transcendence

Yu Dafu is a figure of great magnitude in the history of Chinese literature. His autobiographic novel, as a unique and typical reflection of the art in his age, portraits the recessive spirit picture of modern Chinese.His novel conforms to the creative principle of all literary works being the author's autobiography. It is in light of this interrelation between the author and his works that the main body of this thesis is formed, with conflicts and the transcendence of the conflicts as the sense orientation and with the author and the works as the starting point. To speak more specifically, the first part (the discussion on the author)– Conflicts and Transcendence: the Existence of Contradictive Individual and the second part (the discussion on the works)– Vagrancy and Tranquility: the illustration of the hardness for being alive and the bitterness for being dead interrelate to make the main body an organic whole. With regard to this first part, I, starting with the dual cultural background of Yu Dafu as an individual, shed light on the contradictive nature of both the morality (showed in value conflict) and the form of existence of human beings (showed in the conflict between spirit and flesh) and the flexibility of individual life by the tension between spirit and flesh (showed in repentance and writing). As to the second part, I, with the conflict between spirit and flesh and the transcendence of the two as the central thread, explore in his autobiographic novel the two major themes, i.e., the exhaustion of flesh restlessness (showed mainly in the conflict between spirit and flesh) and the bitterness of searching for spiritual tranquility (showed in the transcendence of spirit and flesh) and the interaction between the two, thus further illuminating the interplay and sense consistency between the recessive mode of despair and trans-despair.Moreover, the preface introduces the theme of this thesis through the heated...