The Beauty Of The Dream And Reality

Fei Ming is a unique writer in the history of modern Chinese literature. The experience of reading his novel invokes a feeling of dream, creating an ambiguous distance from reality. This dissertation is devoted to analyzing the dreamlike feeling of Fei Ming’s novels.Firstly, distinguished academic works dealing with the theme of dream and truth are briefly outlined among numerous comments upon Fei Ming’s novel from1920s and1930s to now. Previous studies mainly employ theory of narration and poetics to interpret his novel, particularly focusing on the Utopian character of language and images in his pastoral novels. Based upon those opinions, I will read his text from a micro perspective of dream, explaining this dreamlike character and its causes in respect with psychology and narrative.The first chapter analyzes the dreamlike character from the perspective of psychology. The poetics of recollection is embedded in Fei Ming’s novel, which reimagines and reconstructs his past experiences. His consciousness of time and space is also fairly free, echoing Bergsonian psychic time. Furthermore, Fei Ming was keen to dig into the depth of mind, putting streams of consciousness in his novels. Recollection, temporal and spatial perception, and stream of consciousness altogether build an imaginative dream of Fei Ming’s novels.The second chapter employs theories of narration to read Fei Ming’s novels. His narrative structures are loose and free. Intersection of various narrative levels and author, narrator characterizes Fei Ming’s novels with inter-text and ellipsis, breaking the traditional realism and pushing itself closer to dreamlike murmuring.The third chapter tries to construct the truth in dream within Fei Ming’s novels, especially his sadness and rancor which embodies his humane consciousness. His choice of drawing dreams is related to his unique aspiration of art and traditional artistic values.Fei Ming is not alone in creating imaginative texts in the1920s and1930s. The ending part of this dissertation will discuss the socially productive mechanism and fundamental causes of psychology, tracing the historical and cultural context.