The Research on Tong Wei-ge’s Fiction: A Narratological Approach

The master thesis re-examines the fiction of Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-ge by the framework of narrative theory, mainly but not exclusively focusing on focalization, character, and plot. Narrative analysis targets short fiction and fiction in different chapters, considers specific common narrative features of the works, and further explores how narrative text renders its potentially expected or manipulated meanings by structural sets. There are four common narrative features in Tong Wei-ge’s short fiction: flexible focalization help divulge messages of the text; one-dimensional time, space, and characters; the moderate anti-plot tendency; and “magic realism” elements. There are seven common narrative features in Tong Wei-ge’s fiction: maneuvers of “zero focalization”; the attach/detach of the linkage between personal pronouns and characters; insubstantial and pallor characters; anti-plot and the intermittent narrative; the flex and fading of time; silent and unharmed ironic rhetoric; and the “magic realism” style. The conclusion of narrative analysis endorses the critical status of focalization from the aspect of divulging messages of the text. Adaptable “focalization shifts” are usually accompanied by a “mediate axis.” Characters, plots, time, space, and rhetorical facets of Tong Wei-ge’s fiction have their overlapping indication to the whole aesthetic appeal within the works. The distinctively silent and suppressed attributes of the works come from principally but not terminologically narrative structures. These help writers and readers encounter bewilderment of life and being.