Analysis On Narrative Structure Of Mao Dun's Novels

The present researches on Mao Dun's novels mostly concentrate on the characters and the thoughts that his works transmit, and the achievements were already quite rich and remarkable. These researches that place stress upon the content generally regard Mao Dun's novels as mirror images which correspond to the reality of the time and reveals Mao Dun's special values. Therefore, it often becomes to judging writer's value standpoint, so it's hardly to avoid drawing the artistic research to a narrow way. Although many people think Mao Dun's novels have little form value, but maybe the narratology theories which place stress on the form analysis can give us some help and opportunity to thoroughly understand the esthetic model of Mao Dun's novels. There are three chapters in the article which mainly based on narratology theories and I will analyze Mao Dun's novels from the analysis on narrative structure factors, the narrative mode of"pursue– disillusioned"and narrative discourse of Mao Dun's novels.In the first chapter, in order to set theoretical presupposition I will discuss some basic structure factors of Mao Dun's novels, including the character(salso the actants), the story, the narrative clues and so on. Both Chinese modern literature theoreticians and western narratologists all pay more attention to the characters in the narrative works. In the general sense, the narratologists regarded the characters as actants which are important to the story structure. The story has two sides, one is the feasible event which be called as"signified"in the linguistics; the other is the specific text which as"signifier". Mao Dun's novels are not only merely signified, but also a self–sufficient signifier's system. The narrative clues are important structure factor of Mao Dun's novels, and the multitudinous"not completed"novels prominently make the narrative clues broken. It makes the works incomplete and therefore set back the reader's esthetical anticipate psychology.In the second chapter, I will abstract the"pursue– disillusioned"narrative mode from the complex stories in Mao Dun's novels, and discuss the writer's deep psychology structure by the method of sequence analysis. The narrative mode of"pursue– disillusioned"story is quite obvious in Mao Dun's preliminary novels, for example, Eclipse, Rainbow, Midnight, Road, Three Human of Lines and so on, and they reflected writer's intense narration interest of the pursuing will and characters'similar defeated destiny. In the analysis, I divide the"pursue– disillusioned"story into four connected sequences: The start of the character's pursue action; disturbance and hindrance from the hostile strength; the pursuer seeks the breakthrough by many kinds of ways; the pursuer is defeated and disillusioned finally. The plot structure of"pursue– disillusioned"story showed the arrangement of the leading character's motion sequence and the whole circumstances of the novel, and it is helpful to us to interpret the works'narrative structure and the potential semantic symbol.In the third chapter, I will analyze the narrative discourse of Mao Dun's novels. The narrative discourse is medium that connect works'surface structure and in-depth structure. Therefore, the analysis of narrative discourse is important to the research of narrative structure of Mao Dun's novels. Pre-narrative and flashback are not commonly used in Mao Dun's novels. Extremely use of the scene, the outline and the abbreviation caused the novels into unbalanced state. The scene is mostly"sole scene"which primarily composed by the characters'conversation, and this hindered Mao Dun from discuss the society, the history and the culture more deeply. In Mao Dun's novels, it is mostly common of the use of omniscient point of view which be used with limited point of view in turn, and the third-person limited point of view also appears in his works. The narrator in Mao Dun's novels often projects his judgment, tendency and values to the description, and it makes objectives to have more emotion of the writer.