Narrative Characteristics Of "Growing-up" Theme In "Post-80s" Youth Novels

Growth is an eternal theme concerned in Youth novels while growing up is a longprocess which means experience, accumulation, transformation. Each younggeneration steps into their adulthood by different ways in different countries aftervarious of trials and tests, tears and tolls. They have shown different dimensions indifferent times and even beared the characteristics of different times. The “Post-80”novel has been in a quite important position in the literary field as a token of theirgeneration represented by Hanhan, Guojingming, Giangfeng etc. In their novels, theyshow their special experience of growth, record their experience, explore their deeperinside of heart, and appeal to their desires of cares, love and achievement with theirunique perspectives and self-confidence. They definitely have shared some commonfeatures and distinctive characteristics by their colorful description and narration.From the angle of narrative strategy, this paper aims to have a demonstration of thenarrative characteristics that “Post-80” youth novels contain when delivering thetheme of “growing-up” under the context of modern consumption. It combines thetext analysis and theoretical study to reveal the narrative strategies adopted in thenovels creation and thus put researches into the background information relating tothe theme creation. The first part is an introduction to the explanation of concept andthe current comments on the “post-80s” youth novels.The second part studies the diverse dimensions of the theme of “growing-up” indifferent times in China and their distinctive characteristics which is a comprehensiveconclusion of the same theme.The third part explores the narrative strategies adopted in “post-80s” youth novelin detail. This is the main part of the paper. It covers three subtitles,that is, thediverse choices of writing subjects which have a demonstration of the psychologicalprocess of the post-80s in the modern society; the second is the analysis of thenarrative strategies used to develop the theme which include internal-focusedself-narration, wanderer-regressed narration, narration in hodgepodge way about theclassic thing, narration about scene image. Then the third is about the style ofnarrative language which is embodied as being internetized, personalitied,popularitied and revelrous etc.The fourth part analyzes the reasons of the changes of the theme and thenexplains the relationship between the social context and novel creation. It reveals theinevitability of changes on the theme and the distinctive expressions in a specialcontext.In the conclusion part, the paper comes to a summary about the narrative strategyused in the post-80s novel and points out the main problems and then outlines a futuredevelopment prospect.