On The Closed Space In Ge Fei’s Novels

Ge Fei, as a writer firstly notable for his avant-garde novels, seems to be difficult to get rid of the hallmark of avant-garde. However, as the trend of avant-garde writing fades out, Ge Fei’s endeavor in literature is still obvious to all. No matter whether in his transitional novel Flag of Desire which received great attention in early1990s or in his recent trilogy, Ge Fei persists in his intellectual thinking all the time and pays more and more attention to human beings’ existence and life. On the whole, extant research on Ge Fei mainly concentrates on unique narrative methods, opinions about memory and time, views of history, discourse of desire and the dissertation on Utopia. My paper tries to avoid the analysis of narrative and work on a special image-closed space which frequently appears in Ge Fei’s novels to reveal his thinking about existence and mental plight and explore the writing attitude Ge Fei takes behind this thinking and the change of it.My paper consists of five parts:In introduction part, I briefly introduce Ge Fei’s writing, generalize the extant research, elicit the main image my paper is about to dissertate and give it a specific definition.The first chapter elaborately analyzes two kinds of closed images in Ge Fei’s novels ("cage of desire" and "plight of homeland") and points out that compared with the second kind,"plight of homeland" has wider meanings and represents the mature form of closed space. Then I interpret closed space’s influence on people and find out its double-edged character:restrictive as well as protective.The second chapter is to illustrate that Ge Fei’s feelings about closed space inherit from modern existential experience. In closed existential plight, some people choose to walk out and some people stay still hesitantly, persist and endure its misery. Comparatively, Ge Fei inclines to be the latter group. In addition, this chapter will analyze persistence in construct and access to transcend in his works:being a failure with the purpose of refusing conventions and sticking to Utopian imagination which only belongs to someone’s heart.The third chapter is mainly to evaluate the transcendence and conservation of the closed space constructed by Ge Fei. Closed space, which is supposed to exist for transcendence, returns out to fall into the trap of escaping from reality. By analyzing the gap between the backward standpoint Ge Fei reveals in the imagination of Utopia and narration of failure and his endeavor to get involved in reality, this chapter interprets Ge Fei’s gradually conservative writing attitude under the cover of breakthrough.In conclusion part, I make a summary, stress the significance of closed space in revealing Ge Fei’s thinking and further interpret the backward attitude in Ge Fei’s recent works.