The Disillusioned Youth During The Period Of Great Revolution

This dissertation centers on Ni Huanzhi,a popular novel wrote by Ye Shengtao after the Great Revolution(五卅),to explore the plight situation that young man faced during the period of post May-fourth Movement.It is quite clear that the crevasse in the text provides us a appropriate point to discover the narrative change in space and time.As a literature subject,the image of Ni Huanzhi showed in the novel is not just a personal tragedy,but also represent the feature of a specific generation in the transformation of Chinese modernityFirst of all,along with the particular social history and intellectual history,the image of Ni Huanzhi would be placed in context of pre-Mayfourth movement,to explain how the local young man came into the Society and reformed the school.Meanwhile,although he was passionate in reforming,he showed sad and anxiety unintentionally,which revealed more sophisticated social and historical issues.Thus,it would make sense to ask why Ni Huanzhi suffer such radical change during this period,and why the author chose to uphold it in a way which doubtlessly cut the text in two section,one reflects in the first 19 chapters full of the breath of countryside and the other shows in the next 11 chapters describe the revolution process in Shanghai.The perspective of Bildungsroman,a primary method in the western novel tradition,would be inserted in the understanding of this question.Finally,the most complex and tragedy theme of this dissertation would be set up in the problem of petty bourgeoisie’s literature(小资产阶级文艺)that reveals in the discussion of Ni Huanzhi in the late 1920s.In short,this dissertation tries to re-discover the difficult choices and illusionary situation through the image of Ni Huanzhi showed in the novel of same tittle.