After entering the 1940s, Ba Jin got rid of the expression of youthful passion and moved from "youth" to "middle age". 1944, ba Jin wrote the rest garden, 1946, ba Jin wrote the cold night. These two works span War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. The former is about the process of displacement, while the latter is about post-war reflection. The former continues to describe the decline of the old family, while the latter describes the division of the new family during the Anti-Japanese War. These two works get rid of the heroic complex in early novels, pay attention to trivial matters, and write a group of "weak lives". Compared with the torrent trilogy, which is also a family theme, these two works are more mature and profound in artistic skills and ideological content, which indicates that Ba Jin has entered the mature stage of creation. From the research situation, since the 1940s, researchers have paid more attention to Cold Night. Among the materials found so far, the articles commenting on Jingyuan are at most one tenth of those commenting on a cold night. This paper attempts to reveal the artistic and ideological characteristics of Ba Jin's maturity in the connection between the two works. When investigating the artistic characteristics of the works, the background of this paper is the torrent trilogy, which is also a family theme; When examining the ideological connotation of the works, the background is the family content and the torrent trilogy written in the early novels. This paper hopes to reveal the development of Ba Jin's novel creation in the 1940s by analyzing the characteristics of these two works.
Ba Jin has been pursuing the truth of art, emphasizing the pouring out of true feelings in the early days, and then turning to reflect the original face of real life. But in any case, he attaches great importance to the role of the writer's subject in objective reality. His feelings are rich and intense, and he never hides his reflection and evaluation of the objective reality, but he never leaves the objective reality to reflect his personal fantasies. In order to create real works, he actually began to pursue seamless techniques at this time, which is obvious in the rest garden and Cold Night.
The rest garden is written in the first person, and the author sets a specific narrator-Mr. Li's "I". I am a writer and a witness to all the stories in the whole novel. The novel adopts the way of recording stories, which seems to be handy, keeps the incompleteness of events and the lack of some links, puts the real scenes in social life in front of readers without rendering, bridges the connection between plots as much as possible, and presents an organized story, but the writer does not pay attention to the integrity of the story, always pays attention to the "I" perspective, and tries to tell the story from the "I" fixed perspective. Strictly exclude the cause and effect that the narrator "I" can't know and the inner activities that other characters in the work can't feel, and seek completeness without a strong breakthrough. Compared with previous works, the rest garden pays attention to calm narration and its objectivity is strengthened. However, for a writer who is famous for his rich emotions like Ba Jin, although he can express his feelings and comments through the psychological activities of "I", it is obvious that this purely objective way does not give full play to the writer's lyrical strengths, whether from the external evaluation or from Ba Jin's own evaluation.
Cold Night uses the third person, and the narrator is the author. In creation, although the writer hides the narrator's "I", he does not easily break the narrative language of the third person, tries to maintain a purely objective feeling, calmly provides some pictures, sounds, movements and phenomena, and objectively describes the characters. But at the same time, the author also tries his best to capture the subtle inner world and mental state of Wang Wenxuan and Zeng Shusheng, and makes an in-depth exploration of human nature. In Cold Night, the plot of the work is diluted, resulting in a strong sense of reality, which is a skillful creative method of stream of consciousness. Due to the wide application of stream of consciousness, stream of consciousness has become a narrative language. The writer dives into the character's heart, tracks his thoughts, ideas and even subconscious psychological activities, integrates all the scenes and events into his stream of consciousness, and constantly appeals to his behavior and physical feelings to connect the spiritual world with the outside world. In this way, the author actually integrates his thoughts, feelings and subjective evaluation into the narrative. Wang Wenxuan, in particular, has a description of his psychological activities on almost all occasions, which the author uses to promote the progress of the whole novel. In the Riptide Trilogy, writers often like to make characters make long confessions or long psychological monologues, which are westernized and appear more passionate and less rational, which is not in line with the appreciation habits of China people. [For more information, please download the full text for free]