A Brief Study On The Intent Of Metamorphosis Mode In Literature Tradition To Transcend The Physical Death

Hegel regarded "metamorphosis" as a form of literature and began to study it in 19th century, since when the study on 'metamorphosis' has lasted almost 200 years. In China, the study concerned come to a peak when the study on "The.Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka was on a surge.Human beings walk on a road leading towards death, which is the cause of every behavior of a man in the world, to some extent. As what Ernst Cassirer has said, the myth can be defined as the firm denial against death to some degree. Having drawn inspiration from that, the author of the paper combed through deformation modes in both Chinese and western literary world, finding that the majority of the modes can be explained by that without exception.There are two ways to reject death: to keep physical bodies alive or pursue the eternal spirits. When the dominant consciousness of the society in China and the West both argue people fight against death by means of making spirits eternal, they persist in rejecting "the death of bodies". However, affected by the dominant ideas, China and The West differ from each other as far as to what extent people believe in spiritual power, which has an influence on how both sides choose the contents of metamorphosis modes. China concentrates on making present bodies of this life eternal, but the West intends to make bodies revive after being rescued with spirits.The minds of Chinese eager to be eternal manifests in two modes: "the unordinary things changes into the form of people" and "people become the immortal". Influenced by Taoism, unordinary things, the human beings and the immortal make a road leading to the eternal bodies. Meanwhile, the west shows their belief in the power of spirit which especially means the power of love in Christianization world by other two modes:" people changes into ordinary things" and "the ghost become people". However, coincidently, both two sides hesitate sometimes, which leads to the change of the cultural meaning some modes have.Both two sides also make the other modes in the field they don't good at, but we can easily know from the text that they don't really stick to the minds the modes show or minds just be distorted. For example, the power of spirit in Chinese modes "people changes into ordinary things" and" ghost become people" is limited and controlled by temporal rules unconsciously; "people become devil" is the result of "devil-ization" on the west's effort to keep the present body alive.Surely, rejecting death is just one of the factors which have important effect on metamorphosis modes. There are other factors showing up as the civilization advance. So it's impossible for the author to classify all the modes only by this factor, and we can definitely find some literature which can't be the example of the view that the mode reflects how people desire to reject death. Whatever, the author believes that the study here is useful. As the saying of Lu Xun goes," we take the image of the literature of Jin and Tang dynasty, by the quantity of works in different theme." We also can give a try to take the image of metamorphosis modes in genesis.