Identity In Milan Kundera's Wrinting On Exile

With his unique experience in life, Milan Kundera paid close attention to and seriously thought about the life existence in exile in a series of his novels. He, with his personal but social writing on exile which is characterized by plain language and philosophy, gave an account of the fight of life existence between forgetting and memorizing, returning and identification, as well as in self-identification under the background of foreign culture, revealing and questioning the multi-dimension and essence of human life existence.The first chapter deals with the relations between Milan Kundera's writing on exile and identity. Because of the fact that Milan Kundera was an immigrant, he had a keen sense and an urgent need on exploring self-identity as well as self-identification. This chapter gives a simple summary on identity and its related theories, also analyzes and summarizes the subjects'identity pursuit, choices and crisises on exile.The second chapter deals with the study of identity types in Milan Kundera's writing on exile. With his unique understanding and communication way on sensitive individuals in mixed historically cultural context, Milan Kundera, in his novels, from politics, nation, gender, and religion, displaied the forms and connotations of self-identity as well as group-identity, and revealed the hardness and limitness of self-identity.The third part deals with identity modes in Milan Kundera's writing on exile. Individuals in exile regard pursuing self-identity as an instinct. However, the process of identification must be a complicated one. We have seen three identity modes in Milan Kundera's novels: individual-oriented one-way identity, value-oriented dual identity and de-centerized identity, which symbolically reflects his perception on the modern society as well as self-identity.The forth chapter deals with the technique expressions related with identity in Milan Kundera's writing on exile. Polyphony narrative, which is an innovation by Milan Kundera in the aspect of novel's narrative, is an expression that is closely connected with dual identity and de-centrilized identification. Multi-view narrative, mixed style, or multi-space structure, all of these is a misplacement of individual identity, losing its essencial identification, and become an polyphonic narrative reflection of process which needs to be changed and instructured continuously.In brief, this thesis is trying to study the identification problem in Milan Kundera's writing on exile in an integrative and systematical way, and to provide a new angle of view in the aspect of studying and understanding Milan Kundera's writing on exile and polyphony narrative art, when human's existing state and spiritual crisis are considered.