〈Elements of Novel Construction〉 —

Taking Taiwanese Local Literature as

Example / Chen Qingyang
In contemporary narrative theory and structuralism, the operation of a novel is regarded as a multi-layered process of narrative construction, rather than a mere linear assembly of discrete elements. The following is an elaboration and theoretical deepening of the "fundamental layers" of novelistic elements from the perspectives of narratology and structuralism:

I. Fundamental Elements of Novel Construction — Narratological & Structuralist Perspectives

Summary:

From narratological and structuralist perspectives, the fundamental elements of a novel are not static categories but a dynamic, interwoven network. Each element is both content and structure. To understand a novel is not merely to grasp what is written, but to see how it is written and how it functions. This approach not only aids in creation and appreciation but also reveals how novels construct reality, memory, and cultural identity.

II. Case Study: Taiwanese Local Novels

II. Advanced Techniques and Aesthetic Layers of Fiction (Narratology & Structuralism)

1. Advanced Techniques and Aesthetic Layers

Summary: From Technique to Aesthetic Depth These techniques are not mere formal devices, but ways fiction constructs worlds, presents experience, and evokes emotion. Narratology emphasizes the power of discourse over story, while structuralism examines how these choices generate meaning, emotion, and reader engagement. In practice, these techniques intertwine—a good novel is built through these layers, mutually reinforcing one another.

1. Application of Narrative Techniques in Taiwanese Nativist Fiction

Summary: From Structural Technique to Nativist Narrative Transformation Taiwanese nativist fiction uses these techniques to achieve narrative transformations: • ✅ Replaces "hero’s journey" with internal transformation of commoners; • ✅ Recasts "tragic arc" as images of systemic and historical oppression; • ✅ Combines "multiple plotlines" with ethnic writing and historical rupture; • ✅ Transforms language, imagery, and pacing into vessels for cultural expression.
These are not just literary techniques but practices of historical narration, identity dialectics, and narrative power.

III. Common Narrative Archetypes This analysis focuses on: (1) Hero’s Journey; (2) Tragic Arc; (3) Multiple Plotlines—analyzing representative works by Taiwanese authors such as Huang Chunming, Chung Li-ho, Yeh Shih-tao, Wang Chen-ho, Li Qiao, and Shih Shu-ching. Rooted in rural, marginal, and commoner life, these works embody local concerns and narrative styles, exemplifying localized adaptations of narrative archetypes.

1. Hero’s Journey Archetype: The Spiritual Journey of Commoners Joseph Campbell’s archetype is deeply demythologized and localized in Taiwanese fiction. Heroes are not conquerors but marginalized individuals whose journeys seek identity and spiritual peace, often ending in cultural return or ethical transformation.

Archetypal Structure: Departure → Trials → Crisis → Revelation → Return → Transformation

Features in Taiwanese Fiction: The "hero" is often an ordinary person, not mythical or triumphant, but struggling within mundane or marginal contexts. Their journey turns inward toward identity, dignity, and personal awakening amidst familial tension, cultural alienation, and social precarity.

Example 1: Huang Chunming’s “Days of Watching the Sea” The protagonist is a prostitute yearning for motherhood. Living in a seaside brothel with a cold foster mother, her fleeting interaction with a doctor ignites dreams of normalcy.

Departure/Call: A sudden inner desire for a child and family sparks her transformation. Trials/Crisis: Rejected by society and the doctor, trapped in stigma and class structures. Transformation/Return: Watching the sea, unchanged externally, but inwardly fortified—a quiet spiritual resistance: “Though nothing can change, I refuse to give up.”

This micro-narrative turns the mythic hero’s arc into a tale of marginal female struggle.

Example 2: Chen Yingzhen’s The Generals’ Family A young man from a military family struggles with belief and class awareness, gradually detaching from his roots.

Departure: Pride in military upbringing. Trials/Crisis: Realizes inequality, dreams shattered, values shaken. Transformation/Return: Leaves his general father’s authority, pursues personal justice—like the prostitute’s journey, a path from familial departure to self-reconstruction, highlighting moral choice.

Example 3: Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia Protagonist Lin Wenxiu, an elite under Japanese rule, drifts post-war. Though educated, he represents commoner identity, navigating cultural uprooting.

Departure: Leaves home for studies and anti-Japanese activism. Trials: Colonial education, exile, cultural severance. Crisis/Revelation: Alienation after Japan’s defeat and regime change. Return: Returns to Taiwan to face his history. Transformation: Becomes a voice of the homeland, no longer an agent of power.

In Taiwanese fiction, the hero’s journey often ends with identity reclamation and dignity restoration—bonding deeply with history and land.

Conclusion In Taiwanese fiction, tragedy stems not from grand fate (Greek or Shakespearean) but from grassroots struggles under oppression, colonial history, marginalization, and imbalance. Protagonists may hold a faint hope or latent dignity, but collapse due to systemic failures or despair.

Taiwanese hero narratives are silent protests. They fight not dragons or magic, but systems, fate, and the desolation of hearts. From Huang Chunming to Chen Yingzhen, these stories are micro-epics of resistance. True heroes are not world-saviors but souls who, even in darkness, refuse to bow to fate.

II. The Tragic Arc Archetype: Structural Disintegration Under Commoner Fate
Prototype Structure:
Potential → Misjudgment/Flaw → Deepening Conflict → Disintegration → Loss/Death

Aristotle’s tragic structure is transformed in Taiwanese nativist fiction into a form of “commoner tragedy under structural oppression.” The downfall of characters does not stem from a noble flaw but rather from systemic injustice, social discrimination, historical silence, and economic inequality. These stories highlight the helplessness of individuals under harsh realities and their ethical persistence.

Example 1: Wang Chen-ho’s A Cow Cart for Dowry
The story follows a rural couple scrambling to prepare a cow cart for their wedding, ultimately lost between material needs and social customs. It reveals vanity amidst poverty, systemic injustice, and the disintegration of family.

• Character flaw: Obsession with "face" and "tradition."

• Fateful misjudgment: Believing a cow cart guarantees a decent marriage and social respect.

• Tragic outbreak: The bride is married off, but the family falls into debt and emotional collapse.

• Catharsis: Readers feel deep sympathy and social criticism through laughter and irony.

• Conclusion: Local tragedies often use a “laughter-with-tears” tone, portraying grassroots characters silently collapsing under the split between traditional ethics and modern order, forming a “brutal reality wrapped in humor.”

Example 2: Chung Li-ho’s The People of the Plain
The protagonist, a Taiwanese man, goes to post-war Japan to find his lost Japanese wife, only to face language barriers, identity discrimination, and emotional estrangement. His pursuit is thwarted by civilizational and marital norms, returning to Taiwan with fractured dignity.

• Potential/Calling: Devotion to love and hope of rebuilding family.

• Misjudgment: Belief in the fairness of colonial civilization and the power of love to overcome institutional gaps.

• Conflict and disintegration: Language barriers, national identity tensions, and interracial marriage issues shatter his dignity and faith.

• Tragic fulfillment: Not only does his marriage fail, but he becomes a "speechless one" outside the boundaries of civil dialogue—symbolizing Taiwans identity crisis under colonization and post-war order.

• The tragedy does not stem from arrogance or personal faults but from the structural rupture of history, culture, and language.

Example 3: Yeh Shih-tao’s Descendants of the Siraya
A young man sets out on a journey of cultural roots but discovers that his indigenous ancestry is buried under ethnic discrimination, historical amnesia, and land deprivation, leading to a deep identity crisis.

• Potential: The dream of historical inquiry and cultural restoration.

• Misjudgment: Belief that finding one’s roots can bring dignity and inner peace.

• Conflict and disintegration: He finds history silenced, his people assimilated, and traditional culture unable to stand in modern society.

• Tragic fulfillment: Becomes a marginalized figure in modern life, where “searching for roots” severs him from mainstream society and offers no true belonging.

• The novel reveals how "historical amnesia" and "cultural exile" form the basis of commoner tragedies, rather than individual choices.

Example 4: Huang Chun-ming’s Sayonara, Goodbye
The protagonist is a Japanese-speaking veteran marginalized in post-war Taiwan. When he mistakenly says “Sayonara” while bidding farewell to Japanese tourists, he is mocked by society. This is a tragedy of “linguistic displacement” and historical dislocation.

• Potential: He once had glorious memories, knew Japanese, and tried to play the role of a friendly citizen.

• Misjudgment: Believed Japanese could still express emotion, unaware of post-war language politics.

• Disintegration: His goodwill is misunderstood as “pro-Japanese” or “out of touch.”

• Tragic fulfillment: A single “Sayonara” leads him into complete silence and disgrace under historical and ethnic pressures.

• This linguistic tragedy vividly illustrates how historical and identity ruptures corrode the lives of ordinary people.

Conclusion:
In Taiwanese nativist fiction, the tragic arc is not about retribution for character flaws, but about “misplaced faith in institutions” and “abandoned identity.” These commoner characters possess potential, emotion, and hope, but are gradually crushed by reality, ultimately becoming mute, rootless, or stripped of dignity—an indigenized transformation of the Greek tragic arc into a structural and historical form.

III. Multi-Strand Narrative: Writing the Interwoven Fabric of Polyphonic Realities
Narrative Technique Description:
Multi-strand narrative refers to a novel having more than one main storyline, consisting of several parallel, intersecting, or complementary narrative threads. These may involve different character perspectives, historical periods, or spatial settings. This technique enriches narrative layers and builds a polyphonic structure, presenting tensions and dialectics among diverse experiences and values.

Transformation in Taiwanese Nativist Fiction:
In Taiwanese nativist fiction, multi-strand narrative often illustrates the overlap of history and modernity, ethnicity and class, individual and collective. Technically, it breaks the linear logic of single-strand storytelling, reflecting the fractured diversity and layered memory of Taiwanese society.

Example 1: Li Qiao’s Cold Night Trilogy
A trilogy blending historical and family narratives—Cold Night, Lone Lamp, and Spirits—traces different generations across eras.

• Strand 1: The older generation’s experiences under Japanese rule and early post-war, touching on colonialism, White Terror, and nativist identity.

• Strand 2: The middle generation’s struggle amid political turmoil and land reforms, reflecting tensions between “ethnicity/nativism” and “modernization.”

• Strand 3: The youth’s confusion and rupture amid urbanization and rising education.
  These three strands intertwine, resonating past and present, forming a cross-generational, cross-ethnic, cross-value tapestry of Taiwanese commoner life.

Example 2: Yeh Shih-tao’s The Red Shoes
A story centered on a prostitute’s struggles on society’s margins, interspersed with side plots involving her clients, police, journalists, and politicians.

• Main plot: The prostitute’s humiliation by police and media exposes gender and class oppression.

• Side plot 1: The police’s internal interests reflect bureaucratic coldness.

• Side plot 2: Journalists sensationalize prostitution scandals, criticizing media ethics.
  These narrative strands collectively show not just an individual tragedy, but how society co-produces and sustains injustice.

Example 3: Huang Chun-ming’s Two Painters
A seemingly simple village story hides a dual-narrative structure:

• Main strand: Two painters work in the countryside, appearing carefree but in truth, poor and resigned.

• Side strand: Through villagers’ interactions and conversations with the painters, the gap in class and values, and the illusion of the “urban dream” are gradually revealed.
  Through dialogues, flashbacks, and perspective shifts within the village, a multi-strand narrative emerges, blending grassroots life and social critique.

Summary:
Taiwanese nativist fiction uses multi-strand narratives not for technical showmanship or structural experimentation, but to capture the diversity and fractures of Taiwanese society. This narrative strategy allows the novel to:
(1) Present layered intersections of history and individual, collective and private life;
(2) Build empathy and contrast across different character perspectives;
(3) Avoid narrative hegemony and open space for multiple interpretations.
Thus, multi-strand narrative becomes a key narrative practice resisting single histories, class oppression, and cultural simplification. Taiwanese native fiction grounds archetypes, transforming grand narratives into ethical trials and cultural reflections of small historical figures, forging a local narrative aesthetic with both structural depth and emotional tension.

Summary Table: Localized Narrative Transformation and Native Aesthetics

This chart clarifies:

• The contrast between Western classic structures and Taiwanese localized transformations;

• The integration of narrative techniques with socio-cultural meanings;

• Representative works that clearly indicate themes and character depth, reflecting Taiwan’s native literary aesthetics.

Conclusion: The Three Core Questions of the Novel
From the perspectives of narratology and narrative structure theory, these three core questions are not only the foundation for textual analysis but also the basic mechanisms for how a novel operates structurally.

Three Core Questions of the Novel: Deepened by Narratology and Structure Theory

Final Note: These Three Core Questions Are the Novel’s Structural Skeleton
These questions are not isolated but deeply intertwined:

• The narrator shapes how the story is seen and felt;

• Plot and motivation structure its rhythm and tension;

• Character changes carry the emotional and thematic weight.

From a narratological perspective, these correspond to: