Modernity, Of Modern Life And The May Fourth Fiction

To explore the modernity of the "May Fourth" fiction, we should not forget its forming factor of true-life basic—modern life. While the "May Fourth" writers "transplanted" the modernity from the west countries, the real life in China had an impact on it. The modernity of the "May Fourth" fiction is the one "survived" in the "soil" of the modern life in China at that time. This paper uses " the region " to refer to this small or large life spaces of the school and university, the avenue, the village and the foreign country, which were relatively independent, which had the different significances of the modernity, and which were the true-life basic of focusing, observing, and experiencing the modernity by the "May Fourth" writers. The modern life had deeply affected the "May Fourth" writers on the experience of the modernity and the narrative way of fiction.The experience of the modernity in the "May Fourth" fiction was the spirit shined by the modern life. The subjective experience of modernity includes not only the individual one, also includes the one of the modern nation and state. The love, the sickness and the death originally are the common phenomena of the life, but they were highlighted in the "May Fourth" period, which had reflected the experience of the modernity of the individual subject of the "May Fourth" writers in the specific historical environment—the consciousness and thinking on the mental, the body and the existence. On the other hand, because national calamity was turning deeper, the "May Fourth" writers' subject consciousness of modern nation and state also greatly increased.The modernity of the narrative way of the "May Fourth" fiction also refracts the light of the modern life in the "May Fourth" period. The "May Fourth" fiction writers first used the first-person narrative way which filling with fervor to break through the traditional entire-known narrative way, which is an embodiment of the subject inflation. In the process of the social fervor cutting down, the narrative way of the "May Fourth" fiction was turning objective gradually. The narrative time of traditional novel has been broken completely by the "May Fourth" writers when they narrated their experiences of different life in those regions. And the space structures in the "May Fourth" fiction were isomorphic with those of the "regions" of modern life obviously at that time. Moreover, the main two plot patterns of the "May Fourth" fiction, "narrating oneself" and "returning home", has the common plot structure, which reflected the basic experience to the modern life of the "May Fourth" writers.