A Research On Li Jieren’s Short Novels

Li Jieren was a writer who was rediscovered in the history of modern literature. His novels hadn’t caused wide attention until 80 s due to the historical and realistic factors. In addition to the well known trilogies —“Mighty River Novel”, he had written more than twenty short novels, which were gathered for the collection of short stories— "badly". All these short stories were an important part of Li Jieren’s outputs, and had unique values in literature and art.In the first place, Li Jieren picked the real things which he was familiar to as the subject matter of novels and mainly focused on the warlord subject. In his stories, he calmly and objectively described the various life styles at all levels that under the warlord rule to reveal the disasters the warlords had brought to Sichuan people. Compared with contemporaneous fictions on warlords, his works were more advanced, universal, profound and authentically.Secondly, Li Jieren used unique artistic skills to shape the characters from various subjects properly. In his novels, he created rich and dimensional characters according to the logic of life and the regional features of quite unique geography. He wrote the growth process of characters in an objective and calm tone and analyzed the soul of the characters in-depth by integrating the western psychological analysis method with his words. All that made the characters more delicately and impressively. In addition, viewing on a new high of humanitarianism and using “exposing and criticizing warlords” as cover, Li Jieren explored the mystery of human nature in a deeper level and made the theme of the novels become more intensively.Finally, Li Jieren changed the writing language from classical Chinese to Vernacular during constantly writing novels. He made the language in his novel transformed by combining dialect and Europeanized language together and formed an unique linguistic style which made contributions to the development of vernacular literature. Thus it can be seen, Li Jieren infused unique features in themes, subjects, languages and skills when shaping characters, and these features composed the artistic values of his short novels.