On The Life Awareness In Jin Yong's Novels

With the appearance of Jin Yong's swordsman novels, "Jin Yong Phenomenon" has become the focus of the public attention. People hold different attitudes towards Jin Yong's novels. Those people with positive attitudes praise his novels as "the pride of Chinese culture" and "the pride of Chinese literature", regarding them as "a silent literary revolution", while those with negative attitudes regard Jin Yong's novels as "fabricating the image of a group of Chinese people unwisely", "causing a big misunderstanding in the world", "imaginary products", "nothing defiant", and even as "the imaginary sinister design of Chinese traditional culture of justice under the modern commercial background of Hong Kong". All the above-mentioned comments make it extremely important to realize and evaluate the narrative value and cultural position of Jin Yong's swordsman novels. Based on the fact that Jin Yong's novels emphasize "reflection of life" and embodiment of "human personality and affection", the present dissertation endeavors to explore into the unique charms of Jin Yong's novels from the perspective of Jin Yong novels' life awareness.The present dissertation holds that the life awareness presented in Jin Yong's novels can be observed from two aspects: the fallacy and tragedy of life presented in his novels, and the disorder and chaos of human world in his works.Chinese traditional culture has created the human image of "father", whose function is to create and save the human beings, so as to emphasize the rational of human source. However, the heroes and images, those swordsmen in Jin Yong's novels, dp not comply with their "fathers" either in time or space, geographically and spiritually. Their "fathers" never function to guide or save them in the course of life. The absence of real "swordsmen" and "father" causes the disappearance of their indispensability,which results in those swordsmen's fallacy of life. Furthermore, Chinese traditional culture lays great stress on the validity and unchangeability of human blood ties when the rational of human source is concerned. The Great Learning advocates the extreme significance of "cultivating one's moral character" and "bringing peace to the world", which indicates the positive attitude towards "being" with rational source. The ideology of "Those -who sow the seeds must reap" emphasizes the irrevocability of blood ties. However, the background of the blood ties in Jin Yong's works seems to be very complex. Like other swordsman novels, the "swordsmen" in Jin Yong's novels are heroes and the incarnation of "goodness" and "justice", and their behaviors are heroic, while their forefathers are a mixture of "goodness" and "evils". The "swordsmen" are actually a combination of "goodness" and "evils". This complex background of their blood ties results in the uncertainty of their birth, which leads directly to the fallacy of those swordsmen's life.Besides, Jin Yong's novels cancel the meaning of the swordsmen's behaviors. This dissertation holds that Jin Yong's works present the human's efforts to struggle against the social disorder and to reconstruct a kind of ideal social order, but such a task is accomplished through the superpower of swordsmen. The source of the swordsmen's superpower is full of mystery and operationally unrealistic, which makes the swordsmen's behaviors unrealistic and unreasonable. Furthermore, since the behaviors of the swordsmen in Jin Yong's novels either form the barrier against historical development, or remain in the realization of personal interest, the rational and justice of their behaviors are thus cancelled and appear to be meaningless.In order to present the tragedy of human life, Jin Yong's novels focus on the description of the heroes' tragic fate and the imperfection in their personality. The heroes always end up in living in seclusion or death, which breaks the traditional ending pattern of swordsmen novels, that is, "the good will be rewarded and the evil will be punished". This type of ending also indicates the dividedness bet...