A Lost Pursuer

Dabo (The Great Wave), firstly published in 1937, won the author Li Jieren a great fame. After the foundation of PRC, Li Jieren rewrote the novel because of the reasons as follows.Three external reasons account for Li Jieren's rewriting. The first reason is to meet the need of the contemporary social background, especially the ideology of the newly-founded country; the second reason is the request of the ideational reconstruction of Chinese intellects; the last one is the requirement of the publisher, People Literature Press, which directly caused Li Jieren' rewriting of Dabo.Additionally, two internal reasons should also be responsible for the rewriting of Dabo. As Li Jieren was assigned to be the vice mayor of Chengdu, his social status made him have to rewrite his works so as to express his acceptance to his new status. What's more, Li Jieren himself believed that there was need to rewrite Daobo in order to improve it.This paper aims to explore whether Li Jiren has changed his literal thoughts while he was rewriting his novel Dabo by carefully comparing the similarities and difference of different editions of Dabo. By comparing the historical events, characters and literal thoughts revealed in the novel, the author of this paper carefully analyzes the contextual similarities and difference of old edition and the new one. A conclusion drawn from the comparison is that the new edition has changed greatly on several aspects, including the historical events, characters and literal thoughts.But after further discussion and interpretation, the author of this paper reaches a conclusion that even Li Jieren made a great contextual change to the old edition, the new edition, basically, continues the old one's core literal thoughts and contextual form. In other words, Li Jieren' literal thoughts revealed by the new edition of Dabo, is strictly in accordance with that of the old edition.