The Narrated Underclass

Nowadays, with sharply transition of society and growing gulf between rich and poor, the phenomenon of underclass has been widely concerned. Migrant works are categorized as underclass for their low-income and hard-life. They have been the literary writing object not only for labor writers, but also for professional writers. In recent years, more and more professional writers take migrant workers as their literary images which almost form a literary trend.Professional writers concentrate their attention on migrant workers’grind of material and trauma of spirit which they encountered in city and show their split in personality after enduring hard life. When facing the extremely social injustice and hard living conditions, some male migrant workers lead a way of revenging with violence and some female migrant workers fight with the cities at the expense of their bodies, most of which reflect their appeal to live in the city and almost all the conflicts are concentrated in the urban-rural dualistic system. We can’t deny that this kind of text reflects the contemporary social reality timely and deeply, which has critically practical significance. However, affected by many factors, the images of migrant workers composed by writers appeared as narrated in some way.Even though misery is an inevitable experience of most migrant workers, professional writers always stack too much misery on one person. What’s more, most of the suffering is caused by coincidence, which doesn’t have universal significance and can’t increase the depth of character or enhance the intensity of social criticism. Misery of the migrant workers has become outlet where writers can release their moral passion, while migrant workers have become symbol of hardship and sympathy,In the group of migrant workers, violence and prostitution exist indeed. When the phenomenon is written in text, violence and prostitution have shown double meanings, one is about social judgment on the heartless rich who caused the reluctant prostitution and a lack of fairness, and the other is to cater the consumption literature and popular culture context. To some extent, the images of these kinds of migrant workers are narrated.The appearance of migrant workers is the result of social modernity and urban-rural dualistic system. In professional writers’text, migrant workers’attitude to urban and rural has been greatly simplified. Neither the extreme thirst for the city life, nor the extreme infatuation for country life can reflect the real and complex emotion of migrant workers. In this sense, migrant workers’ subjectivity has lost, becoming the counterpart of the urban-rural dualistic system, to which extent, the migrant workers are narrated.On the narrative level, the narrator is frequently offside, trying to intervene in migrant workers’ words and behavior, which makes them become conveyor of writers’ idea and passive acceptor of some experience. In order to enhance the sense of reality, first-person narrative is used which generates apparent flaws in the text. Even though the narrative problem just exists in part of the text, it reflects professional writers’ ambiguity when they state their points on the underclass.