Character Study On Milan Kundera’s "Thoughts-narrative" Novel

Contemporary Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera is one of the novelistswho have created the new literary form for novel in the20thcentury. With his novelcalled “thoughts-narratology” novel, all narrated in the novel refers to the theme ofmeditation. The character generation and structure are also serving meditation. It istheme unity that Kundera uses to replace plot unity. Based on the character view ofexploring the possibility of human’s "experimental self", the characters in Kundera’snovel take on new look. This dissertation starts from Kundera’s character view andnovel text and theory, and attempts to make the study concerning his character.The introduction exhibits the development of the concept and theory of character,and its research review at home and abroad, and briefly summarizesthe study status of Kundera’s novel character. This dissertation consists of six parts.Chapter one interprets the development of novel’s discourse from story-narrative,narrative and thoughts-narrative, and analyses the characteristics of Kundera’sthoughts-narrative novel. Chapter two summarizes Kundera’s character view and theinfluencing factors of philosophy and music. Chapter three analyses character’sgeneration, which can be divided into three categories: the time-traveling character,‘abnormal state’ character and non-self features added or subtracted character,respectively examines character’s synchronic and anthropology characteristics, theunknown boundary of human being in the special plight and the ‘experimentalself’authentic essence. Chapter four examines character structures, demonstrates to usthe mirror figure, trio combination and quartette combination. The charactersstructures formed by the subtle inner thematic connection play a certain role indeepening the themes. Chapter five analyses the features of character typical of pathnovel, respectively the disappearing central character and episode character and thecharacter as author. Chapter six analyses two characteristics of Kundera’s characterview, namely post-modernity and openness, emphasizes that compared withtraditional and closed character theory, Kundera’s character view has the trendtowards an open theory.