On The Disaster Writing In Chi Zijian 's Novels

Disaster is a kind of external force which comes accidentally, suddenly and destructively, generally including natural disaster and man-made disaster. As disaster is closely related to human’s social life and literature is the reflection of social life, disaster calls great attention of literary writers’attention, which focuses on how disasters occur and how people live and feel during and after disasters. By describing disasters, writers record the life reality, examine the complexity of humanity and probe into the value and meaning of life. Chi Zijian provides lots of intellectual food to readers in her thirty years’writing career. She pays close attention to common people’s daily life and writes about their happiness and sorrow. Among her series of famous novels, there are particular ones showing human’s survival predicament and spiritual world through the description of disaster. Based on the analysis of three classic disaster novels by Chi Zijian----anchukuo, All Nights in the World and Snow White Crow, this thesis describes the disaster situations in Chi’s novels, analyzes the features of Chi’s disaster writing and study the value and significance of disaster novels.Chapter One introduces the disaster theme and Chi Zijian’s narrative choices. Through a brief investigation on many Chinese disaster texts, it can be seen that disaster is one of the classic motifs of literary creation and an important subject matter for many writers. Chi Zijian is constantly focusing on disaster works and this is closely related to the environment she was raised and her particular life experience.Chapter Two is about the writing of disasters in Chi Zijian’s novels, including four parts. The first part makes a detailed analysis of such disaster situations as war, mine accident and plague in Manchukuo, All Nights in the World and Snow White Crow. The second part analyzes the plentiful connotation of humanity through different choices of characters. In the face of an accident, some people take a tenacious attitude and strive actively; while others just sink into depravity. The author praises the good of humanity on the one hand and criticizes selfishness on the other hand in order to call for healthy and natural humanity. The third part describes how common people deal with difficulties with the help of love and ethical rule, transcend the fear of death, dissolve the tension between the finite and the infinite and realize the value and meaning of life. The fourth part analyzes the "norm" and "change" in hard times. By describing people’s daily life in disorder, Chi finds that there exists great vitality in regular life, and constancy and continuity can bridge the fracture caused by disaster in daily life; which means there is "norm" in "change".Chapter Three tells about the meaning of Chi Zijian’s disaster writing. First of all, literature can not only record disaster and keep traumatic memories to help people improve disaster consciousness, but also infect people with sincere feelings to heal the world and get self-salvation. Secondly, the author explores the cruelty in human life and criticizes inequality in the society by investigating people’s hard living in disasters. Chi’s warmth can be looked as a way of compensation; she attends to the characters in her works with tender emotions and forgives the evilness of human nature, so as to construct an atmosphere reconciling with predicament and express the writer’s humanistic concern of her characters. At the same time, this kind of tender feeling has its limitation; it weakens the criticalness of works to some extent and covers the cruelty in real life.