A Study Of The Characters In Dong Xi’s Novels

Dongxi is a contemporary famous author,who was born and raised in the marginal area of Guangxi,he has experienced a period of great change in Chinese social environment.At the same time,he is also a writer who came from the countryside to the city,so he feels the difference between traditional rural culture and modern urban civilization,especially the spiritual dilemma of modern people.His unique individual life experience and keen observation make him an important and unique writer in the contemporary literary world.His vigilant,hesitant,affirmative and critical strokes reveal his concern to face the value and meaning of life and to strike at human nature and social reality.In his nearly thirty years of creative work,Dongxi has published four full-length novels,more than ten collections of short and medium-length stories,and several collections of essays and plays,with a large number of works and a wide range of contents.The research results of Dongxi’s novels in the academic community are quite rich and the perspectives are quite broad,but the depth and breadth of research on character images are still insufficient.Most of them are based on the interpretation of characters in a single text,and there is basically no systematic research on characters.Therefore,the author chooses the character images in Dongxi’s novels as the research topic,and while sorting out the types of character images,analyzes Dongxi’s methods of shaping characters,and explains the value connotation behind character shaping,providing necessary supplements for the overall research of Dongxi’s novels.The thesis is based on a close reading of Dongxi’s fictional texts,combining his life experiences with textual analysis and comparative research methods to explore the characters’ images in Dongxi’s writing in various aspects.Apart from the introductory and concluding sections,the content of this paper is divided into three chapters:Chapter 1 explores the deep-seated reasons behind the shaping of character images by exploring Dong Xi’s individual experience.Combined with Dong Xi’s prose,essays,interviews,and other content,it can be seen that many story plots and character images in his novels are the recognition and expression of the author’s identity.On the one hand,the characters’ activity space,character,and experience in the novel are closely related to the author’s growth environment.On the other hand,Dong Xi,as a witness of the “Cultural Revolution,” has a deep understanding of the spiritual trauma that the“Cultural Revolution” era brought to people,especially children.The second subsection explores the influence of Dong Xi’s own life experience on the shaping of character images.One is that with the development of the commodity economy,Dong Xi saw various people in the tide of the modern society,and they showed the phenomenon of collective spiritual rootlessness.The second is Dong Xi’s inheritance of the Gui literature experience and the literary acceptance of southern writing such as Shen Congwen and Faulkner,which made him unconsciously lean towards southern writing in his own creation.It is the unique individual experience that often makes him take the small people in reality as the prototype when shaping characters,revealing their difficult living conditions.Chapter 2 classifies the distinctive and prominent character images in the work by gender by combing Dong Xi’s novels.Among the male characters,there are mainly three types: the first is the image of a father who is absent or runs away,who either disappears or dies,or fails to fulfill his father’s duties and does not have the authority of a father;the second is the male who is blinded by power and desire,who spares no effort to pursue money,fame,and power,or abuses money and power to control others’ souls;the third is the puppet trapped in the fate circle,who repeatedly repeats the same fate,even if he struggles fiercely,he is powerless to get rid of the cycle of fate.Although Dong Xi’s description and shaping of male characters are far more than female characters,it does not mean that there are no typical female characters under his pen.On the contrary,the female characters under his pen also present several representative types.The first type is the ideal girl who is kind and simple,with extraordinary appearance and quality;the second type is the sensitive and fragile love patient,who does not consider the pressure of survival,who longs for spiritual and emotional satisfaction,and pure love,but the reality and ideal always have gaps,making them gradually doubt themselves,their partners,the people around them,love,and the future;the third type is the fallen and decadent woman,some of whom accidentally entered the city from poor rural areas,and they had to choose to sell their bodies to survive in the city without any dependence.Some of them were lost in the paper drunk and gold dazzled of the city,and became the appendages of men for money and other interests.Some of them were deeply influenced by traditional ideas,and even if their husbands were extremely unbearable,they still chose to depend on them.These characters under Dong Xi’s pen are not heroes who save the world,nor are they big people who talk big,but ordinary people at the bottom.The systematic classification of characters in Dong Xi’s novels is still the first time in the study of Dong Xi’s novels,and the author hopes to expand the depth and breadth of the study of Dong Xi’s novels with this.Chapter 3 explores Dong Xi’s artistic methods of shaping characters.The author uses characters and stories to map reality and convey emotions,seeking resonance from readers.In terms of character portrait description,Dong Xi presents a cartoonish description feature.In addition to grasping the key appearance parts of the characters to depict the characters,Dong Xi is also very good at using exaggerated deformation methods to show the characters’ portraits.In terms of psychological description,Dong Xi often uses the first-person perspective to show the characters’ inner world and analyze their psychology.This can be seen from the long works “Regret Record” and “Echo”.At the same time,he actively attempts to reveal the psychological activities of the characters from the background of the scenery,with a view to reflecting the inner world of the characters from the externalization of their hearts.Dong Xi has created a large number of charming and distinctive character images based on his own life experience,which not only injects new vitality into the writing of Guangxi,but also adds more new faces to the character gallery of contemporary novels.It is hoped that through the analysis of the character images in Dong Xi’s novels,his novels and contemporary literature research can be promoted.