On The Sense Of Wandering In The Neozoic Novels

Wandering is one of the eternal ways of being for humankind, It reflects the confrontation and disharmony between life entity and its surroundings. The subject of wandering is highly stressed and fully displayed in Chinese and foreign literary history. The sense of wandering bora of such a state of living, i.e. the incertitude of accommodation for life and spiritual pursuit and the absence of confidence in life essentials and the feelings and emotional experiences of an unfulfillable life, has demonstrated the state of mind and the cultural connotation which are undergoing profound changes with the advancing of the times and the increasingly deepening of man's 'self-dissection1. Neozoic writers rooted in the 1990s, starting from their observation of people's embarrassment and spiritually wandering when failing to find the spiritual evidence for their existence in the period of social transformation, by means of direct artistic feeling and individualized reasoning, persisted in studying the domain of human survival, and acutely expanded the potential state of life itself. From those two aspects, "wandering life" and "wandering life for Being", the author analyzes the sense of wandering in neozoic novels in this paper. This sense of wandering is manifested in the confrontation of man and his surroundings, conflicts between people and the alienation between one and his self in the commercialized world. Heroes or heroines living in this world were always filled with the uneasiness from the fallen spiritual homeland, experienced the solitude when they lost their love affiliation, and suffered from the pain brought by the self-contentment without and feeling of lost within. The author further investigates the significance of the neozoic writers' artistic practice of breaking from the tradition, unceasing revolution and innovation. In demonstrating people's existence of spiritual wandering and in quest of the values of human beings in the present time, they get rid of the blind approval, adherence and imitation in the doctrines of some Chinese genres indealing with some ideas in modern Western literature since 1980s, therefore the sense of wandering in the neozoic novels grasped the essentials of life and told the truth about it. The author analyzes the limit of neozoic writers' way of composing, i.e., focusing on the exterior and meeting "the present" face to face: in their description of a wandering life, they were obsessed by the exterior and stuck to "the present" stiffly while absent in treating the quest and consideration of the nature of wandering, which led to the lack of rational depth, ideological thickness and power of criticism in neozoic novels.