| A discussion of the short stories of Lao She as revealing a basic conflict in the writer's desires to be wen, "a man of the pen," and to be wu, "a man of the sword."The first two stories Lao She wrote, "Little Bell", first published in 1923, and "An Excursion", first published in 1929, are shown to contain the basic concerns and themes, and the main character traits and types which recur in Lao She's repertoire of sixty-eight short stories (written between 1923 and 1958).The last three chapters discuss the wen-wu conflict through formal, linguistic, and stylistic analyses of Lao She's narrative styles.The majority of Lao She's stories are shown to have an overt narrative voice which tries to achieve a sense of rapport with the reader and asserts its views to the reader, most often in the judgment of character.The first seven chapters of the dissertation discuss Lao She's desire to be a man of action and his dissatisfaction with being a man of letters, his solution and eventual resolution of his problem, through character and thematic analyses of his stories.The stories in covert narration, specifically those which present a character's consciousness or state-of-mind, are analyzed linguistically to illustrate how the line between narrator's discourse and character's mental discourse is more difficult to draw in Chinese than in English. A character's mental discourse may, at the same time, sound like the narrator's discourse with the reader. Some of Lao She's stories are shown to take full advantage of the ambiguities in the Chinese language.It is concluded that Lao She differs from other major modern Chinese writers in his attitude towards his readers and towards himself as a writer. The conversational and casual narrative style typical of Lao She shows a sense of rapport and community with his readers, rather than a sense of alienation from them. Though he was a modern writer with an individual voice and style, his relationship with his reader is very much like that of the traditional public storyteller and his audience. |
