Choosing·Trudging·Losing

This dissertation scrutinizes and analyzes three groups of novels which belong to the "narration of university" style. It researches the image of Chinese modern intellectual and elaborates their changing tracks in the changes of times and society from the perspectives of both the features of the times and the intellectual's image reflected in the novels and the writers' language situation of writing. Combining with the characteristics in the space and time and the cultural features of the "narration of university", this dissertation put emphasis on analyzing the relations between the psychological changes of the intellectual's identity and the changes in the real world in order to attract people's attention to the reconstruction of the intellectual's identity. The dissertation includes three chapters.The introduction gives a sketch of the cultural interpretation of the part that the intellectual played in the history and analyzes what they received and discarded in the terms of self-identity during the transformation from the ancient literati to the modern intellectual (the changing from the speaker of the ruler to the spokesperson of the common people). However, as history moves forward, the image of intellectual undergoes unceasing changes both in history and in the reality.The first chapter analyzes the intellectuals' different choices towards culture that live in the background of the war in the 1940s through the novels Fortress Besieged and Song Never to End. First, although harboring the patriotism towards their country, the intellectuals can merely drag out an ignoble existence under the clash between the Chinese and Western cultures; second, for the purpose of saving their nation out of suffering, they have the romantic ideal of living humbly and even sacrificing their lives. These two intellectual's cultural psychology both marked deeply by the certain times and create different images respectively: people who live in the predicament of culture besieged city and the social ridgepole with romantic imagination.The second chapter is about the novels The Song of Youth, The Life in University and People, People!, and analyzes the changes of the intellectuals who shocked by the ideological reformation after the establishment of the People's Republic of China and the reasonable reflection on their images in the trend of ideological liberation. It explains the continuity and replacement of the three images of the present intellectuals, which change from the revolutionary who accept reformation voluntarily, the scholar who eulogize socialist construction, and finally to people who wake in the reasonable reflection.The third chapter analyzes the novels Peaches and Plums and Peach Blossom, and elaborates that with the deepening of China's reform and the policy of opening to the outside world, the intellectuals face the invasion of consumerism culture. No matter they choose to receive it, to elude it or to refuse it and stick to humanism, they are trapped in the predicament of identity reconstruction and have to become estraies in the modern society.The conclusion generalizes the different images of intellectuals in three different periods in the history, indicating the relations between the changes of their images and the outside environment and advocates that the intellectuals should surpass the reality, stick to their independence and self-determination, and establish their eternal value for their existence as a culture.