The Narrative Art Of Liu Heng 's Novels

Liu Heng is not a prolific writer in contemporary literature. His writing, the description of living situation, the impartial consideration of soul and the deep analysis of humanity about Chinese, is more comprehensive and profound than contemporary writers. These features are not only due to the penetration of his thought, but also have more benefit from his superb narrative skills. Throughout critical review on novels of Liu Heng, they are mostly concentrated on some topics such as analysis of the humanitarian, living situation, humanity and desires, but lack of interpretation from the perspective of narrative. Obviously, this research status, emphasis too much on content but ignore the form, on such an important writer is undoubtedly insufficient.This paper started with the narrative patterns, analyzed the art of narrative in novels of Liu Heng from the parts of narrative time, narrative voice and narrative focalization.The text is divided into four sections.The first chapter analyzes two narrative patterns in the novels of Liu Heng, started with the causes, performance and aesthetic pursuit of the narrative patterns. In my perspective, there are two narrative patterns in Liu Heng’s novels:"missing of faith-retriever" pattern in initial stage; "ideal pursuit——shattered" pattern in maturity stage. These two narrative pattern formation is closely related to the unique personal experience of the writer. Maturity narrative pattern is significantly different from the initial stage, besides the influence of writer’s personal life experiences, the more significant reason is the reference of philosophy Nietzsche, Schopenhauer in the mid-eighties of the twentieth century. Aesthetic pursuit of tragic consciousness is the common ground of these two narrative patterns, and this tragic consciousness accompanied by Liu Heng’s novels has gone from implicit to explicit development process.The second chapter focuses on Liu Heng’s narrative time. Taking Genette’s theory about the narrative time in narrative discourse as the basic, I grasp the relationship between narrative time and story time in Liu Heng’s novels from sequence, duration and frequency. In addition to the order, Liu Heng’s flexible application of recount has generated more objective narrative effect. When it comes up to build a relationship between the narrative time and story time in a different time, Liu Heng prefers to the scene and pause. Frequency relationship between narrative and story are unique in Liu Heng’s novels, he uses a special form of a single narrative to create a narrative loop.The third chapter learns the theory of narrative voices of Susan S.Lanser, explores different narrative voices concerns in Liu Heng’s novel. The distinction among narrative voices of personal, authorial voice and communal voice do not have any rank differences. The narrator of authorial narrative voice have greater authorities, easy to form multiple dialogue relations between author, reader, narrator and story characters. The form of authorial narrative voice is the most widely used by Liu Heng, this narrative way mostly adopted in his mature works.Objectively, the analysis of the narrative focalization of the fourth chapter relates to the analysis of the narrative voice of the third chapter. That narrative voice to "say" is narrative focalization to "look". Narrative voice means the voice of narrator, and narrative focus means the way of receiver. This chapter combines Genette’s and Todorov’s classification of narrative focalization, exploring the relationship between the narrator and the characters in Liu Heng’s novels with zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization. The internal focus exists in Liu Heng’s novels as the main body of the hybrid variety focuses, access to multi-contemplation of the narrator and the characters in specific narrative situations.Liu Heng has rich narrative skills, which shows the enthusiasm of ideological expression and fascination with the diversification of the story. This paper makes a breakthrough of the previous interpretation of the Liu Heng’s novel, which concentrates on the content than form, and makes a new analysis combine classical narratology theory with post-classical.