The Pioneer Novels’Narrative Strategy Of Liu Yichang

Liu Yichang is the famous writer of Hong Kong. He has produced lots of works,which can be roughly divided into two parts: on one hand, as a publishing-house editor, he hascreated a group of secular works, this part having astonishing quantity but weak literariness;on the other hand, depending on his own literary accomplishment and literature sense ofresponsibility he creates plenty of form-innovated novels with unique thoughts. This type ofnovel is the object of this paper’s study. In the latter kind of novel, he borrows foreigntechniques such as the stream of consciousness of the West, takes into account with the localculture and the custom of oriental creation, and thus creates novels with unique text forms andprofound text connotation. In the novel narrative strategy, he rejects all kinds of factors in thetraditional novels, emphasizes a full innovation in the fields of both conception and form—notonly giving fresh forms to the texts but also cohering the texts with modern consciousness—and therefore expresses his discontent to the modern society and reflections on the modernhumanity.Based on Liu’s form-unique novels, starting with his novel narrative strategy,deploying techniques such as western narration theory, France’s "new novel group" narrativetheory and Freud’s psychoanalysis theory, and closely analyzing the texts of Liu’s pioneernovels, this article discusses and explains the characteristics in the four fields which arenarrative angle, narrator, narrative time and space, and narrative language type. Therefore thepresent thesis mainly falls into four parts:The first part largely analyzes the role of narrative angle in the narrative strategy ofthe novels. Liu has deep insight into the human life and loses confidence in Hong Kongsociety. His novel from the content constructs double angles of spirit and flesh and perceivesthe main conflicts within the characters’hearts both physically and spiritually. In addition, forthe exploration of the form, apart from using the angle of the characters, Liu adopts unusualangles such as of animals and scenes. These angles are different from those we are familiarwith. The uniqueness of angles attaches profound connotation to the texts and increases theirreadability. These angles are not simply parallel but to replace one another with the need ofnarration. Narrative angle is the beginning of Liu’s attempts to innovate novels and constitutes an important part of the narrative strategy.The second part mainly analyzes the role of the narrator in the novel narrative strategy.The narrator depicted by Liu is unconventional. He opposes the ordinary narration of characterbut chooses three kinds of unique narrators who are "wine", "dream" and“shadow”to analyzethe connotation of the text. Man intoxicated often reveals his ideas deep in the soul. Therefore,words under intoxication are the character’s redemption of real life; dream is where ideals arerealized and promotes the development of the story; man staying alone often shows his realthoughts, and at this moment, if the character’s mind is shadowed, his personality will getenriched.The third part mainly analyzes the role of narrative time and space in the novelnarrative strategy. Narrative time and space survive in contradiction. They interact with eachother and neither is dispensable. On one hand, they together constitute the time and space ofevents in the narrative texts, develop constantly according to a certain order, and promote eachother; on the other hand, narrative time consists of psychological time and story time. Theconflicts between the story time and psychological time constitute the development of thenarrative events and enrich the connotation of the text. Abnormal events set in the narrativetime form the blank of narrative time and highlight the helplessness of the city life.The fourth part mainly analyzes the role of narrative language type in the narrativestrategy. Narrative language type is mainly shown in the language of the narration. First, byusing the oriental legends or mythological prototypes, the language is permeated with orientalconsciousness; second, using zero language with no emotions makes the text objective; third,the language itself has a de-familiarization property, and the thoughts are expressed in anunconventional way by using black-and-white background alternation, different fonts andpunctuations and word repeating.Liu’s contribution to the literature history is not limited to narrative strategy. However,the uniqueness of narrative strategy plays a significant role in studying the uniqueness of thetext form of Liu’s novels.