The Face Of Nothingness - Read Eileen Chang

Zhang Ailing has been mentioned and expounded again and again since the 1990s. Correspondingly, her works has been ranked as one of the best-sellers. With the advent of the current 21^st century which is characterized by consumptionism, the popularity of Zhang Ailing is not merely a hot issue in the field of literature comments and has evolved to be a kind of pop element. In the past recent decades, there emerged an immense number of literature comments about Zhang Ailing and her works.The tragic implication in Zhang Ailing's works has drawn much attention from a great many observers and has been unearthed and elaborated to different extents. Her unique tragic style, in my opinion, mainly stems from the nihility element in her mind. This thesis, in the light of nihilism, illustrates Zhang Ailing as well as her works. By reading carefully her works to sum up and analyze the nihilistic inclinations in her works, in combination with historical background of her time and her life experience, the reasons for the formation of her nihilistic ideology were investigated and discussed. At the end, a rough comment was made on her writing attitudes as a writer experiencing nihilism.Besides the effects of her life experience and wars at her time, the influences of pragmaticism in Chinese traditional the-way-of-the-world novels on Zhang Ailing and her works were unearthed when the reasons for the formation of her nihilistic ideology were probed into. This part, although seems somewhat crude, attempts to understand Zhang Ailing and her works in a new aspect.