Affiliation:
1. Southeast University , China ■ , China
Abstract
Abstract
This paper sets out to examine how the first-person plural narration form is used in diasporic Chinese American writer Yiyun Li’s short story “Immortality” to represent the collective loss of subjectivity – namely how she represents the consequences of that loss from a psychological perspective as part of her experiment in artistic innovation. It explores Li’s characterization – especially her realistic depiction of the collective narrators’ psychology under totalitarianism and how she allows their psychology to affect the form of her representation. I argue that although through the ventriloquy in English, Li has given the “we”-narrators a discursive voice to articulate their hidden thoughts and feelings – something not possible in their mother tongue, the “we”-narrators are unable to exceed their existential limitations to speak a purely personal language immune from official appropriation. Li’s story also underlines the extreme form as well as the emotional consequences of that collective loss of subjectivity, namely the “we”-community’s avoidance of mass melancholia in reaction to the tragic end of their compatriot victim of the dictatorship in order to preserve their prevailing collective ego-ideal.1
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