Narratives Of The Subaltern In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath And Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads

Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads(????????1988)is widely considered as the Chinese counterpart of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath(1939)due to their common themes.As two realist novels representing the subaltern class,both of them are deeply rooted in the realistic contradictions,yet they transform them into an aesthetic power with transcendence and universality.Both of them inherit the great literary tradition of realist novels,yet they make it to be an innovated narrative form but in different ways.The most common feature in their representations should be their innovative re-creation of the intrinsic social events.The thesis will focus on literariness and its generation,to investigate their intercommunity in narratives of subaltern and reconsider their literary values.Firstly,with different artistry of non-linear narratives,the novels deconstruct intrinsic elements and logic of the original social event,create the aesthetic authenticity,construct the narrative multidimensionality and imply the sense of inevitability and inescapability.Secondly,with the parallel of the nature and the human and the reversal of the female and male roles,the novels display the ecological subversiveness to the anthropological and patriarchal stances and make themselves comprehensive narrations of the subaltern.Thirdly,through the investigation of the postmodern features in them,it finds that with the blurred boundaries between the resistant and the subordinate and between the real and the fictive in the two novels,the novels deviates away from typical“social protest novels”but create an ensemble of group images of the subaltern of their times and achieve transcendence beyond single events.Through this parallel study,the two novels can shed light on each other in borrowing research perspectives and discovering narrative qualities.Probing into their literariness under the tag of subaltern narratives could break the ideological shackles and literary bias,and the innovation in The Garlic Ballads and the postmodern consciousness implied in The Grapes of Wrath can be recognized.The thesis is also an investigation of their subaltern space and an attempt of narrative thematic study.