The Memory Of Suffering And Self-redemption In Zhang Xianliang's Novel

Zhang Xianliang’s novels are written from his personal memory and seek spiritual self-redemption through his personal commitment to and reflection on historical suffering,showing his unique creative pursuit and stylistic charm.As a member of the "returnees" group of writers who returned to the literary world after the calamity,Zhang Xianliang is different from writers who have experienced the Red Revolution,such as Wang Meng,whose bourgeois origin made him enter life and writing with a deep sense of original sin.This makes his life and writing different from those of his contemporaries as well as from similar writers who have had the same experience.Zhang Xianliang is both a witness and a thinker of history,and the suffering he experienced is the common experience of a generation and the common memory of a nation.Zhang Xianliang’s novels show the self-reflection and anxiety of those who have returned from the calamity with extreme suffering writing and self-mutilating confessions.The memory of suffering and traumatic experiences have had a profound impact on his lifelong creation and choices,and the writer,in his concern for the changes in social reality,has also conducted a deep introspection and analysis of his own and his contemporaries’ suffering experiences.Zhang Xianliang carries the spiritual trauma of a generation of Chinese intellectuals,and with the belief that "if I don’t go to hell,who will go to hell",he willingly undergoes reformation,faces the bitter sea of life openly,and seeks the resurrection of his life and the salvation of his soul through the baptism of purgatory-like sufferings.Through a holistic study of Zhang Xianliang’s fictional works,we can find that although Zhang Xianliang is familiar with Capitalism,he is not a Marxist,and his reflection on historical suffering and willingness to suffer for self-redemption only seek his own soul liberation,not the liberation of all mankind in accordance with the goal of proletarian revolution.He writes about the memory of suffering in order to find the path of self-redemption in literature,to get rid of the entanglement of the historical memory of suffering,hoping to obtain the liberation and sublimation of his soul in the reflection and repentance of his heart like a bodhi,expecting to heal the invisible scars that history has put on the souls of the survivors in the mourning for the unfortunate.This dissertation takes Zhang Xianliang’s fictional texts as a reference,and makes a historical review and analysis of Zhang Xianliang’s personal memory and suffering process from three levels: suffering experience(surface level),historical reflection(middle level),and self-redemption(deep level).The first chapter mainly focuses on Zhang Xianliang’s personal experience,combing through the writer’s suffering experiences in a special historical period,and through sorting out the memories of suffering in Zhang Xianliang’s novels,a preliminary understanding and judgment of Zhang Xianliang’s life trajectory is made.The second chapter focuses on the reflection and analysis of Zhang Xianliang’s novels on his own suffering experiences and those of his contemporaries,pointing out that the background of the times and personal encounters constitute a two-way view of historical suffering and personal memories in Zhang Xianliang’s works.The third chapter explores Zhang Xianliang’s personal struggle for self-redemption through the baptism of suffering,illustrating the writer’s difficult journey to find a way out of suffering with a willingness to suffer in order to obtain social identity and soul redemption,and theoretically exploring the unique value of self-reflection and self-redemption in Zhang Xianliang’s novel creation.