Free Choice And Responsibility In An Absurd World:An Existentialist Interpretation Of Yiyun Li's The Vagrants

Yiyun Li,a famous Chinese American writer,has been engaged in exploring the universality of humanity,paying great attention to the living predicaments and spiritual world of people from distinct cultural backgrounds.The Vagrants,her first novel,won the gold medal of California Book Award for Fiction in the second year.The novel mainly tells a story about the living predicaments of Chinese people in a period of great historical change.This thesis adopts Sartre's existentialist concepts as absurdity,freedom of choice and responsibility to make a detailed analysis of the existentialist predicaments people encounter and the choices they make.This thesis includes four chapters.Chapter One introduces Yiyun Li's life experience and major literary achievements,the plot of The Vagrants as well as the current research on Yiyun Li and her works both at home and abroad.Chapter Two mainly introduces the development of existentialism,some key existentialist philosophers and Sartre's existentialism,namely the absurdity of the world,existence precedes essence,freedom of choice,situations and responsibility.Chapter Three first analyzes the absurdity of the world in the novel,mainly the alienated interpersonal relationship and the feeling of loneliness.Then,this chapter analyzes main characters' free choices and their corresponding responsibility after they experience all the existentialist predicaments.Chapter Four is the conclusion,summarizing the analysis of the previous chapters.Yiyun Li shows her existentialist thinking towards human existent condition through describing the existentialist predicaments and psychological state of common Chinese in The Vagrants.Although living in an absurd world,we can live meaningful lives through making free choices and shouldering corresponding responsibility.