The Father-search Writing In Yu Hua’s Novels

“Father” is a cultural symbol with rich connotation in the change of history,and is also an important literary image often appears in the literary works.Writers in shaping the different father image reflects the different tendencies of their creation,and someone idolized their father as they were growing up,someone blasphemed against their father or judged their own father,someone killed the father,or the others have been looking for the father,and so on.Yu Hua also wrote about the image of the father in his many novels.Whether in his early novel creation,or after the transformation of his novel creation,Yu Hua often chooses the family as the foothold of his writing,and with the aid of the figure of a father in a family to express the theme of looking for the father.Yu Hua is not just simply through the father figure,of course,to reflect the purpose to search for a father,he is more through the protagonist’s fatherless situation and their father-son relationship to reflect the theme of searching for the father.Whether it is the widely acclaimed long stories as Alive,A Story of Xu San-guan Selling Blood,orthe controversial long stories as Shouting in the Drizzle,Brothers and On the Seventh Day,or his many novellas and short fictions such as Blood Plum Blossom,Things Are Like Smoke,and A Kind of Reality,these works all involve the image of the father and the description of the father-son relationship,which not only reflects Yu Hua’s thinking on the blood ethic relationship,but also reflects his observation of history and reality,as well as his exploration of the hero’s spiritual psychology of searching for a father.This paper takes Yu Hua’s writing about seeking for a father as the research topic,and tries to systematically explore its various features,including the deep root of the writing about seeking for a father,the deep meaning of the writing about seeking for a father,the background and value of the writing about seeking for a father,so as to reveal the uniqueness and significance of Yu Hua’s writing about seeking for a father.In Yu Hua’s novels,the main cause of the protagonist’s "search for a father" is the anxiety under the "fatherless" dilemma,that is,the absence of his father.The father’s absence is divided into two cases,one kind is the absence caused by the death of his father,the other is the father is alive but useless when they’re growing up.Both of these situations make the protagonists,whether out of the need for identification in the physiological sense or the spiritual sense,in an urgent desire to find an ideal father.Of course,this fatherless state also points to the deep reason for their search for a father to the hesitant,lost and confusion of existence.From the perspective of the implication of searching for a father in Yu Hua’s novels,looking for their father,the character of the novel mainly has three meanings.The first meaning is to find the father of the blood.In Yu Hua’s novels,there are always many images of lonely teenagers crying out in despair,eager to find their biological father,andtheir search for a father is actually a process of trying to reshape the disordered family ethics.The second meaning is to seek the guidance from their spiritual father,sons in Yu Hua’s novels,although some biological father is still alive in the world,but many poor juniors failed to get their biological father’s love,they are still lack of a real spiritual pillar,so this makes them tend emotionally and psychologically to the adoptive father or stepfather who really provides their life guarantee and spiritual protection,which leads to the opposition and contrast between the biological father and the adoptive father and stepfather,and the related writing of searching for the father also reflects the call for the reconstruction of the spirit of the times to a certain extent.The third meaning is to look for themselves,on the one hand,the young protagonists in Yu Hua’s novels are looking for the spiritual guidance represented by the symbol of father in the helplessness of losing their father;on the other hand,they are not willing to lose their self-consciousness and strive to find themselves in the process of searching for the ideal father.Their search for a father is not only to find their lost spiritual world,but also to find their lost self-existence.To explore the reason and peculiarity of Yu Hua’s writing of searching for a father,we find that it is not accidental for Yu Hua to write about searching for a father,which is influenced by his own experience of father-son relationship.The life experience of Yu Hua as a father and as a son urges him constantly to write about father-son relationship.In addition to the influence of the father-son relationship experience in his own life,the father-search writing in Yu Hua’s novels is also influenced by the foreign literature and drawn by traditional ethics and other factors.Compared with other writers’ writing about the relationship between the father and the son,Yu Hua’s writing about the search for the father not only lashes the ugly father method which interferes with the dignity and freedom of the son,but also summarizes the tenderness between the father and the son.His father-search writing reflects the change from antagonism to tenderness between the father and the son,as well as the change from human crisis to human resurrection.