‘역사-가족’ 민간서사 양식의 새로운 시도

Abstract

The 'history-family' folk narrative style has already been recognized firmly as one of the main streams of the Chinese contemporary novel. It is a form of a narrative that depicts the history through creating a novel by focusing on a story of family generations. But in the previous novels, the story about the family merely worked as a background with the writers being excessively obsessed on the preciseness of the actual history. Thus even with containing both the family and the history, it never was made into one single harmony. However Mo Yan, in his Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, layed rest to the heavy burden of the history itself and allowed his abundant imagination to roam freely which ultimately upgraded the novel into an area where no other writer has reached before. This article makes a detailed analysis on how the 'history-family' folk narrative style has developed based on Mo Yan's Life and Death are Wearing Me Out.