A Study Of Yu Hua's Short Stories In The 1990s

Yu Hua is an important contemporary Chinese writer, whose novels have always been a hot point of literary studies. However, the perspective of researchers mostly concentrated on Yu Hua's several novels, and ignored his artistic achievements on novella. This paper reviews Yu Hua's creative processes since the 1980s, in which analyses Yu Hua's few-noticed 1990s novella as an entirety of the novels he created.In 1990s, some transformations appeared in Yu Hua's writing convinced by the criticism for ?To Live? and ?Chronicle of a Blood Merchant? earned him a great reputation.As a result, the research of the short stories intermingled in these novels for the transformation study of Yu Hua's creation is also very important. With Yu Hua's transition of creation from the pioneer to the civil, the novella created in the 1990s mixed among them, showing their own characteristics. Firstly, Yu Hua remained his pioneer thinking by the short stories of 1990s.Therefor, in these short stories, Yu Hua is still questioning the existence itself and examining the evil of humanity, describing the uncertainty of individuals' fate, directly writing the absurdness of destiny, interpreting the hypocrisy of civilised order and the nothingness of modern people embodied behind absurdness. Secondly, compared to before, the main idea and connotation of 1990s novella have undergone significant changes. Yu Hua extends his view to the attempt of tangible life areas and substitute the city space of life and everyday "a ground covered with chicken feather" into his creation, enabling readers feel the authenticity of life in frivolous fragment description. Moreover, in the 1990s short stories, the characters changed from the abstract "symbol" to specific lives, obviously weighing more in his work. Furthermore, among this, Yu Hua shapes distinctive images of boys, who tolerate loneliness, eager to grow, being naive and unworldly. Correspondingly, there are adults in life. Men who can be gentle and loving fathers feel tired of marriage, and new modern female who are different from traditional conventions dare to seek self value and freedom of marriage, and all of them add vitality into novels.Finally, in these novels, Yu Hua paid attention to unprecedented spiritual emptiness of modern people under the highly developed material civilization. In the bizarre life, people have been experiencing dual crisis from both emotion and family, they have no any hobbies or interests, lost the passion for life, wander and struggle around the edge of daily life. Yu Hua examined the various emotions of modern life in a spectator's point.As for stylistic features of the novel, Yu Hua exploited narrative techniques of "repeat and recurrence" to build novels' architecture in the short stories of 1990s, integrating his understanding of Western music and literature into the creation. Repeat on the titles, words and plots resulted in the simplicity of novels, while the meanings of the novels generated and expanded unlimitedly. On the other hand, the recurrent narrative style highlighted the nature of survival state of modern people. As the length of short stories is not too long, "dialogue" has become the main narrative strategy. Instead of immersing into narrative, Yu Hua gave its way to characters, shortening the distance from novels with life and increasing the authenticity of narrative. Meanwhile, the narrative approach "dialogue" is beneficial to show the relationships between characters and mental activities in a concise and subtly way, so that the narrative becomes flexible and in-depth. Short stories in the 1990s mainly focused on moments in life with loose plots and detail descriptions, many descriptions even squeezed spaces of the novels, resulting in slowness and stagnation of episodes, just to highlight the noisiness and emptiness of modern life.In a word, Yu Hua's short stories in the 1990s had not only their own writing styles, but also laid foundation for the creation of full-length novels in the 1990s. They can be recognized as the "transit station" during his transitional period. The novels can look back to pioneer writings in the past, and meanwhile paved the way for later creation.With a unique aesthetic form, they become important parts that cannot be ignored in his novels. Such research is conducive to a more comprehensive grasp of Yu Hua's novels.