A Study Of Black Humor In Wang Xiaobo’s Era Trilogy

Just like the characters in his works, Wang Xiaobo was considered to be a weird and independent person. Unlike other writers in the 1950 s, Wang’s writing style was unique. And because of his unique, he got his own position in the history of Chinese modern literature. Wang’s main writing style was influenced by the society and his own experiences. His humor of self-mockery can already be sensed in his works by the time he was working as worker and teacher. And the American style “black humor” was unprecedented adapted by him while he was studying in the US in 1984. The sense of history, culture, society and the dark side of humanity can easily be sensed in Wang Xiaobo’s works. After learning from the American black humor and together with his own experiences, Wang had blossom the most unique “black” flower in the history of literature.Wang’s life was devoted to literature. He believed in Russell’s philosophy that human need to think about life and find his beliefs in the category of liberalism. And at the same time, he also found out the anti common sense and humanity imprisoned social thought. So it is not surprised that his works was considered as “rebel against orthodoxy” at that time. Wang’ thoughts had broken the boundary of literature at his time, and he brought philosophy ideas and thoughts into life. Influenced by translator and poet Wang Daoqian and Zha Liangzheng(Mudan), Wang Xiaobo’s words were poetic in his works. In novel writing, Wang was most influenced by Calvino, who puts life into writing, and considered “burden” and “limit” as the precondition of all writings and pursue “leisure” and “infinity” in both his life and writing. That is why it was saltatory and poetic in Wang’s works.The study and analyzes of Wang’s Era Trilogy in this dissertation were divided into four main parts. In the first part, the origin and style of Wang’s black humor were found based on the current academic research and study on Wang Xiaobo. In the second part, the reason of black humor in his works and how foreign black humor had influenced Chinese literature were discussed. In the third part, the characteristics of disturbance of thought in Golden Age, the narrative style of anti-utopia in Sliver Age and the absurdness in Bronze Age were separately discussed. In the last part, attentions were drew on the character Wang Er and his value of existence and the practical significance of his black humor.