위화(余華) 『제7일』의 평등론

Abstract

This article examines Yu Hua's novel, The Seventh Day, whichfocuses on an alienated class of nameless people in contemporaryChina and social inequality caused by the gap between the richand the poor. This thesis attempts to analyze their miserable lifeand unfair death based on the code of death and the narration ofmemory. people including Yang Fei who led a miserable life andwere faced with unfair death wander the afterlife aimlessly withoutrest, lacking the money for a burial plot until Liu Mei takes himto the Land of the Unburied. When it comes to the space of death,it is a strategic setting in that the writer can decipher how thingsreally happened without regard to the limitation of time and space. What's more, all the characters he meets are also the dead, whichcould be an excuse to escape from the preemptive censorship of thegovernment especially when the writer criticizes the governmentpolicy and social polarization in contemporary China. Though various kinds of methods of narration have been triedthroughout Yu Hua's novels, Yu Hua has consistently taken ‘death’and ‘equality’ into consideration in his works. This article hence engages four intimately linked realms of inquiries regardingpeople's unfair death under the unequal social structure in thisnovel. First of all, this essay explores the situation where peopleget socially alienated with the application of capitalism in China. Furthermore, this inquiry concentrates on China’s practice of‘backroom politics’ and the dubiosity that Information from themedia is selected or fabricated according to political need, and thenreleased through channels determined by the same considerations. In addition, this study focuses on the violence of government,which leads to the suppression of the people. Last but not least,this study traces the process of the way to dissolve the form oftraditional family and suggest the possibility of creating new kindof family, which could be connected to the place of the Land of theUnburied, community of the people.