The Aesthetic Cultural Explanation Of The Death Narrative In Lin Yutang's Novels

Lin Yutang,a Chinese American who is a renowned scholar worldwide,composed a great number of rich,substantial and profound intellectual products during his approximate half century's literal life.Lin Yutang is good at describing.His seven novels' themes are different from one another,while they all put importance on life,especially in narrating death at which presents peculiar characteristics that in some extent creates aesthetic effects and reflects peculiarly cultural implication.On the basis of Lin Yutang's seven novels' texts,Moments in Peking,Leaf in the Storm,The Vermilion Gate,The Red Peony,Juniper Loa,Chinatown Family and The Magical Island,this paper mainly illuminates these novels' characteristics,aesthetic effects and cultural implications of narrating death.This paper is divided into three chapters except introduction and epilogue.The introduction of this paper mainly introduce Lin Yutang's composition of novels,the comprehensive illumination of narrating death and the key points and highlights of this paper.The first chapter analyses Lin Yutang's narrative of death.Based on sorting the narrative of death in his seven novels,this paper concludes Lin Yutang's “Death Complex” and the forms of death in his compositions.In his novels,the appearances of death are multiple in number and form.What's more,the death of Lin Yutang's novels mostly have indications,which indicates characters' death through some explicit objects,dreamland and some other things like predictions and words of sign.Second,there are brief narratives of death like detailed descriptions of death and the etiquettes of funerals,and Lin Yutang uses internal-visual-angle to narrate death.In the second chapter,on the basis of explaining Lin Yutang's novels' characteristics of narrating death,this paper analyses the aesthetic effects of his peculiar narrative methods.The presage narratives of death add a lot of suspense which makes the plot of novels up and down.The multiple death and the brief narratives of details and funeral etiquettes create the cold and cheerless atmosphere.Adding the characters' holding back their emotion before they die and the decrease of emotional conflicts,all of these create the “Mild Tragedy”,which makes the plots of death well coordinate with harmonious keynote of whole composition.In addition,the brief narrative is exactly another form of “White Space”,which means limited number of words can motivate readers' imagination and let readers do re-create activities to strengthen tragic effects.The third chapter analyses Lin Yutang's peculiar narrative of death from the perspective of cultural implication.Lin Yutang is a synthesis of culture.His life experience forms his life consciousness that mixes Chinese and western culture,which lets him directly face life and the philosophical meaning of death.The brief narrative of death exactly reflects his contradictory view of life which is traditional Chinese view of life in Confucianism,Buddhism and Taoism as well as western Christian view of life.The presage narratives of death reflect traditional culture of ghosts and gods,folk beliefs and so on.The epilogue of this paper makes conclusions about this whole paper.