Chapter 7, Section 3
“Constituent Elements of the Novel” — Using Taiwanese Local Fiction as Examples
Contemporary narratology and structuralism emphasize that the textual operation of the novel is a multi-layered process of “narrative construction,” rather than merely a linear combination assembled from several elements. The following is a further expansion and theoretical deepening of the “constituent elements of the novel (basic level)” from the perspectives of narratology and structuralism:
I. Constituent Elements of the Novel (Basic Level) — Perspectives of Narratology and Structuralism
- Basic Elements
Element
Narratological / Structuralist Analysis
- Character
Narratology regards characters as “agents of action,” whose function is not limited to advancing the plot, but also serves as a carrier reflecting thematic tension and value opposition. Greimas’s actantial model classifies characters into functional roles such as subject, object, helper, and opponent, while structuralist approaches to fiction emphasize the character’s “arc” and their capacity for transformation and response within the structure. The shaping of a character includes not only appearance and psychology, but also how their linguistic behavior constitutes narrative nodes.
- Plot
Plot is the core of the novel’s narrative structure, consisting of a causal chain of events and a combination of temporal sequences. Narratologists such as Tzvetan Todorov believe that plot contains a deep structure of “initial equilibrium → disruption → restoration / new equilibrium,” while Bremond emphasizes the variant pathways of “possibility → realization → non-realization.” The plot of a novel is not a singular linear development, but rather a construction interwoven with structural techniques such as conflict, delay, flashback, and foreshadowing.
- Setting
From a structuralist perspective, setting is not merely the spatial and temporal container of narration, but also part of a symbolic structure. It may possess symbolic meanings (for example, the city symbolizing modern alienation, the countryside symbolizing simplicity), and it mutually reflects the characters and plot. Fredric Jameson points out that setting is also a “spatialized presentation of historical ideology.” Therefore, the setting of a novel often carries cultural, class, and political structures, becoming a key link for understanding character destiny and narrative meaning.
- Theme
Theme is the “central mechanism of meaning generation” in a novel. It is not a message that can be directly extracted, but is gradually generated through plot structure, character choices, and narrative strategies. Narratologists believe that theme is a deep semantic structure emerging from “narrative logic,” involving the conflict and dialectics of value systems (such as justice vs. power, freedom vs. tradition). Themes are often deepened through techniques such as metaphor, symbolism, and repetitive structures, and form multi-layered interpretations through structural mirroring and contrast.
- Narrator and Point of View
The narrator is the “carrier of discourse,” rather than the author themself. According to Gérard Genette’s classification, narrative voice may be divided into heterodiegetic narration (third person) and homodiegetic narration (first person), while points of view include omniscient limitation, internal focalization, and shifting focalization. Point of view determines the reader’s “distribution of knowledge” and “emotional positioning”; therefore, the selection and transformation of perspective (such as unreliable narrators or multiple perspectives) often become part of the novel’s structural strategy.
- Style
Language style undertakes the dual roles of “aesthetic function” and “semantic layering” within narrative structure. It includes not only sentence patterns, rhetoric, and rhythm, but also concerns the narrative stance of “who is speaking,” “how it is spoken,” and “why it is spoken in such a way.” M. Bakhtin regarded novelistic language as a heteroglossic “polyphonic context”; therefore, language style also reflects the dialogue and tensions among different classes, cultures, and generations within the novel. Style may simultaneously become the transmitter of plot rhythm, character personality, and thematic metaphor.
Summary:
From the perspectives of narratology and structuralism of fiction, the basic elements of the novel are not static classifications, but a network of interlinked and interwoven relationships. Each element is both a component of content and part of form and structure. To understand a novel is not merely to grasp “what is written,” but also to perceive “how it is written” and “how it functions.” Such a perspective not only aids creation and appreciation, but also helps reveal how novels construct reality, memory, and cultural identity.
- Using Taiwanese Local Fiction as Examples
Novel Element
Transformative Characteristics of Taiwanese Local Fiction
Representative Works and Explanations
- Character
Characters in Taiwanese local fiction are often lower-class common people such as farmers, fishermen, laborers, street vendors, soldiers, and prostitutes. Character construction emphasizes their condition of being oppressed by social structures. They are not heroic figures, but rather “resisters,” “endurers,” or “silent sufferers” within life’s predicaments. Their “transformation” is not necessarily positive growth, but may instead involve retreat, concealment, or despair.
🔸Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea”: the prostitute A-shui attempts to reform and longs for a child, yet amidst social discrimination and poverty, she accompanies herself by watching the sea. Her transformation is a form of silent inner adjustment.
🔸Wang Zhenhe’s “A Bullock Cart for Dowry”: the characters realistically present the value conflicts and gender tensions of a small farming family. There are no noble heroes, only the absurdity and cruel tricks of fate imposed upon common people.
- Plot
The plot no longer follows the typical Western arc of “adventure — climax — resolution,” but instead often adopts forms such as the unfolding of trivial daily matters, accumulation of localized conflicts, and endings without climax, thereby forming a “weak plot” structure. Endings are often open-ended, pessimistic, or anti-climactic, highlighting the absurdity and fatalism of reality.
🔸Zhong Lihe’s “The Native Land”: the journey of failing to find his wife appears plain and uneventful, yet in fact the plot gradually accumulates the protagonist’s anxiety over identity and language barriers. His eventual return to Taiwan symbolizes inner fragmentation.
🔸Ye Shitao’s “Red Shoes”: the unfolding of the female protagonist’s prostitution incident appears simple, yet actually reveals layer by layer the manipulation of the media and gender violence. The plot development itself becomes a cross-sectional diagram of social structure.
- Setting
Settings are often villages, coastal regions, small towns, military dependents’ villages, or marginal colonial cities. These places are not merely spaces, but generative sites for character predicaments and class conflicts. Natural landscapes are also rich in symbolism, such as the ocean, rice fields, old streets, and wastelands, becoming backgrounds for psychological projection or cultural consciousness.
🔸Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea”: the seaside becomes a dual symbolic space of emotional sustenance and social isolation for the heroine.
🔸Li Qiao’s “The Cold Night Trilogy”: spanning from mountain regions to cities and crossing both prewar and postwar periods, it constructs a map of Taiwanese transformation interwoven with ethnic groups and historical eras.
- Theme
Themes in Taiwanese local fiction mainly concern the loss of land, class conflict, ethnic contradictions, rural transformation, and gender inequality, presenting the plight of common people amidst the collision between modernity and traditional values. Themes are often not proposed through direct reasoning, but gradually emerge through concrete details of life, dialogue, and symbolic imagery.
🔸Wang Zhenhe’s “Rose, Rose, I Love You”: using the military-base society as its setting, it reveals the intersecting oppression of coloniality, militarization, and sexual commodification.
🔸Chen Yingzhen’s “The General’s Clan”: portraying the class disparity and identity anxiety of the descendants of mainland soldiers, the theme lies hidden within the emotional fractures of military families.
- Narrator and Point of View
Taiwanese local fiction often employs limited third-person perspective or first-person self-narration, creating emotional tensions of intimacy, limitation, and repression. The narrator is not omniscient, but empathetic, listening, or even silent, reflecting the voicelessness of common people and the absence of narrative authority in reality.
🔸Zhong Zhaozheng’s “The Dull-Ice Flower”: adopts a limited third-person perspective, focusing on the tragedy of child laborers and impoverished children. Its tone is simple, and the language closely resembles the speech of rural people.
🔸Ye Shitao’s “Blind Men Touching the Elephant”: narrates a political trial through multiple perspectives, displaying the complexity and fragmentation of historical truth.
- Language Style
The language of local fiction often adopts colloquial expression, mixed Minnan dialect, concise refinement, or rhetoric flavored with local scenery. Its plain linguistic style contains criticism and poetic quality, possessing dialectal flavor, social perception, and simultaneity of narration. Language style is also one of the cores of the “local aesthetics” of local fiction.
🔸Huang Chunming: his language is colloquial and filled with local slang. For example, “Sayonara · Goodbye” narrates social upheaval through the tone of children.
🔸Wu Zhuoliu: although his sentences are elegant, they conceal criticism of colonial experience. “The Orphan of Asia” presents a kind of “lyrical style under oppression.”
II. Advanced Techniques and Aesthetic Layers of the Novel (Narratology and Structuralism)
- Advanced Techniques and Aesthetic Layers
Technique / Aspect
Explanation and Deepening (Narratology & Structure-based Commentary)
- Narrative Structure
Narrative structure is the formal skeleton of the novel, arranging both the logical sequence of events and their order of presentation (story vs. discourse). Todorov and Genette distinguished “order,” “duration,” and “frequency,” making narrative no longer merely a timeline, but a conscious selection:
🔹Flashback: creates suspense and a thematic tone dominated by memory;
🔹Interpolation: adds background or supplements motivation, constituting narrative deferral;
🔹Disrupted narrative: imitates psychological consciousness and social collapse;
🔹Multiple narrative lines: provide plural perspectives and layered truths, forming a “structural counterpoint” effect;
🔹Circular structure: strengthens fatalism or cycles of memory, as in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
- Character Arc
A character arc displays the internal transformation of a character during the narrative process. Narratology regards characters as subjects of value choice, whose psychological changes correspond to thematic dialectics. Common arcs include:
🔹Bildungsroman / growth arc: such as The Little Prince, moving from innocence into understanding;
🔹Fallen arc: such as Gregor in The Metamorphosis, whose transformation from man into insect symbolizes alienation;
🔹Reversal arc: such as in Kafka’s novels, where seemingly rational characters suddenly fall into absurdity;
🔹Static arc: such as the little people in Huang Chunming’s fiction, whose arcs consist of resistance and suppression;
Narratology views these transformations as nodes where theme and plot structure interact.
- Types of Conflict
Conflict is the fuel driving narrative and the support point of plot rhythm and thematic exploration. Narratology regards it as the source of “narrative energy,” and it may be divided into:
🔹Person vs. person (external conflict): clear adversarial relationships creating tension;
🔹Person vs. self: internal moral, psychological, or emotional struggle, common in modern fiction;
🔹Person vs. society: presenting institutional oppression, cultural maladjustment, or class struggle;
🔹Person vs. nature / fate: intensifying existential themes or tragic tension;
Structuralism further analyzes how these conflicts influence character arcs or form “plot arcs” and “thematic mirrors.”
- Pacing
Narrative pacing refers to the sense of time and narrative density in the presentation of events. Gérard Genette divided it into operations such as “scene,” “summary,” “ellipsis,” “delay,” and “insertion”:
🔹Fast pacing: uses action, dialogue, and accumulation of events;
🔹Slow pacing: incorporates psychological description and landscape description, creating contemplation and accumulated tension;
Novelists may also create “contrasts of tension and relaxation” through pacing (for example, the slow pacing of In Search of Lost Time vs. the oppressive rapidity of 1984) to influence reader perception and emotional fluctuation. Pacing is also part of the “poetics of time” in the novel and possesses aesthetic value.
- Imagery and Symbolism
Imagery is the sensory symbolization of linguistic description, while symbolism is the condensation and transformation of meaning. Imagery in novels possesses triple functions: narrative function, thematic projection, and psychological reference. For example:
🔹Ocean: freedom, fluidity, rootlessness, the female subconscious;
🔹Wall: separation, order, power, enclosure;
Narratology also pays attention to the “repetitiveness of symbolic imagery” (motif). When a certain object repeatedly appears, it acquires functions of echoing, summoning, or contrast, intertwining with character destiny.
- Thematic Variation and Mirror Design
Thematic variation arranges a core theme repeatedly through different plots or characters, forming a narrative variation. Mirror design creates contrasting or counterpointed characters, parallel plots, and symmetrical scenes, such as:
🔹Opposing characters (mentor vs. antagonist) presenting differences in paths of value choice;
🔹Scene correspondence: the opening and ending of the story displaying change within the same setting;
🔹Plot repetition: under the same circumstance, different characters make different choices;
These designs give the novel structural beauty and deepen the multiple interpretive layers of the theme.
- Beginnings and Endings
The opening of a novel is the starting point of the narrative contract and determines how readers become engaged.
🔹Narrative hook opening: sudden events, heterogeneous language, or mystery settings attract attention;
🔹Calm opening: ordinary daily life gradually turns unusual;
Endings may be divided into:
🔸Closed ending: conflicts resolved and character growth completed;
🔸Open ending: such as in Kafka’s fiction, where blankness allows readers to participate in meaning construction;
🔸Twist ending: unexpected developments highlighting deep thematic contradictions;
These strategies all belong to the art of designing narrative nodes and serve as the “entrance” and “exit” of novel structure.
Summary: From Narrative Technique to the Path of Aesthetic Deepening
These techniques are not merely formal operations, but ways in which novels construct worlds, present experiences, and evoke emotions during narration. Narratology emphasizes the controlling power of “discourse” over “story,” while structuralist approaches to fiction further analyze how these structural choices generate thematic meaning, emotional atmosphere, and modes of reader participation. In creative practice, these techniques are often interwoven. An outstanding novel not only possesses refined plots and moving characters, but is also the result of the layered construction and mutual correspondence of the above techniques.
- Applications of Narrative Techniques and Textual Examples in Taiwanese Local Fiction
Technique Aspect
Applied Analysis and Textual Examples
- Narrative Structure
◉ Fragmented narrative and interpolation techniques:
🔸Li Qiao’s The Cold Night Trilogy interweaves three narrative lines — family, politics, and ethnicity. Time is arranged non-linearly, employing flashbacks and recollective narration to present fragmented memories of Indigenous peoples and mainlanders, war and displacement, thereby forming the narrative shape of historical rupture.
🔸Huang Chunming’s “Sayonara · Goodbye” uses children as the narrative center. On the surface it appears linear, yet through details and flashback insertions it reveals the silent tragedy of the parents, forming narrative tension and irony.
- Character Arc
◉ Static and fallen character arcs:
🔸The heroine in Ye Shitao’s “Red Shoes” does not move toward traditional “rebirth” or “enlightenment”; instead, she collapses amidst sexual violence and social humiliation. Her arc presents a fallen trajectory of “repression → struggle → loss of speech,” echoing patriarchy and media violence.
🔸The prostitute A-shui in Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea,” although dreaming of reform, can ultimately only comfort herself by “watching the sea.” Her growth resembles a “static transformation” rather than an active turning point.
- Types of Conflict
◉ Oppressive conflicts between person and society / fate:
🔸The protagonist in Zhong Lihe’s “The Native Land” is expelled in a foreign land because of language, identity, and institutional barriers, symbolizing the rootless wandering of postwar Taiwanese people between Japan and China, and presenting conflicts between individuals and systems, as well as cultural identity and fragmentation.
🔸Wang Zhenhe’s “Rose, Rose, I Love You” reveals how Taiwanese common people confront the oppression of military hegemony and sexual commodification amid the intertwining of American military bases and prostitution culture.
- Narrative Pacing
◉ Slow pacing constructs psychological pressure and social atmosphere:
🔸Wu Zhuoliu’s The Orphan of Asia uses extensive detail description and interior monologue. The plot progresses slowly, yet through this it displays the gradual psychological deconstruction of “linguistic self-collapse” under colonial pressure.
🔸Zhong Zhaozheng’s The Dull-Ice Flower advances gradually and slowly, step by step accumulating the father’s sacrifice for his child, social injustice, and unequal distribution of resources, thereby strengthening the emotional depth of the tragedy.
- Imagery and Symbolism
◉ Objects symbolizing social systems and psychological states:
🔸In Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea,” the “sea” symbolizes escape and freedom, while also symbolizing the isolation and voicelessness of female characters at the margins of society; the “child” becomes a symbol of unfinished dreams and hope.
🔸Ye Shitao’s “Blind Men Touching the Elephant” uses “touching the elephant” as a central symbol of the unknowability of truth and the fragmentation of historical narration, while also metaphorically implying the blindness and lies of Taiwanese society under political manipulation.
- Thematic Variation and Mirror Design
◉ Multi-character contrast and thematic mirror structure:
🔸Li Qiao’s The Cold Night Trilogy forms mirror relationships of ethnic experience through the parallel narration of multiple characters (Hakka people, mainlanders, Indigenous peoples): each ethnic group becomes a forgotten subject within history.
🔸In Wang Zhenhe’s “A Bullock Cart for Dowry,” the contrast between the male and female protagonists in value choices becomes a mirrored comparison between familism and modern individualism, strengthening the thematic layers.
- Opening and Ending Techniques
◉◉ Open endings or anti-climactic endings highlight the tension of reality:
🔸The protagonist of Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea” is a prostitute who wishes to reform and longs to have her own child. The novel ends with her waiting uncertainly for the future. No definite direction of fate is provided, but through the act of “watching the sea,” the story symbolizes the character’s inner healing and longing for freedom, presenting a subtle and open ending.
🔸The ending of Wu Zhuoliu’s The Fig Tree depicts the protagonist gazing silently at withered plants in a wasteland, unable to speak. This symbolizes an anti-climactic narrative that refuses to provide hope, instead revealing the deep silence of truth and the helplessness of life.
Summary: From Structural Techniques to the Transformation of Local Narrative
Through these advanced techniques, Taiwanese local fiction successfully accomplishes the following narrative transformations:
✅ Transforming the “hero’s journey” into the static inner transformation of common people;
✅ Transforming the “tragic arc” into oppressive images of social systems and historical memory;
✅ Combining “multi-line narration” with ethnic writing and experiences of historical rupture;
✅ Transforming language, imagery, and narrative pacing into carriers of cultural subject expression.
This is not merely the performance of literary techniques, but also a practice of historical narration, identity dialectics, and narrative power.
III. Common Narrative Archetype Types
The author focuses on the following three types:
(1) Hero’s Journey;
(2) Tragic Arc;
(3) Multiple Plotlines;
and combines representative works by Taiwanese local fiction writers for concrete analysis, including the novels of Huang Chunming, Zhong Lihe, Ye Shitao, Wang Zhenhe, Li Qiao, Shi Shuqing, and others. The subject matter of these works is deeply rooted in rural life, marginal regions, ethnic groups, and the lives of ordinary people. Possessing distinct local concern and narrative style, they are important examples for exploring the local transformation of narrative archetypes.
- The Hero’s Journey Archetype: The Spiritual Long March of Ordinary People
The “Hero’s Journey” model proposed by Joseph Campbell has been profoundly “demythologized” and “localized” in Taiwanese local fiction. Heroes are often not conquerors, but little people from the social bottom and marginal regions. Their journeys are not for glory, but for the search for identity and spiritual settlement, often ending in a form of cultural return or ethical transformation.
Archetypal Structure:
Departure → Trials → Fall into Crisis → Revelation → Return → Transformation
Transformative Characteristics in Taiwanese Local Fiction:
In Taiwanese local fiction, the so-called “hero” is often not a mythical figure with legendary origins or one who saves the world, but rather ordinary people, marginalized individuals, or disadvantaged groups from the lower classes. Their journeys do not move toward external victory and glory, but toward inner struggle and understanding. Living amid daily trivialities and the cracks of society, facing the hardships of reality, displacement of identity, and emotional isolation, they complete a silent yet profound “spiritual long march.”
Example One: Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea”
The protagonist is a prostitute who longs to reform and have her own child. She lives in a brothel in a coastal village, has a cold relationship with her adoptive mother, and her brief interaction with a doctor gives rise to her desire to become a “normal woman.”
Departure / Call:
On an ordinary day, she suddenly develops the wish to have her own child and family. This desire becomes the starting point of her inner transformation.
Trials / Crisis:
Reality repeatedly frustrates her. She is neither understood nor accepted, and even her trust in the doctor may not be reciprocated. Social stigma and class structure become prisons from which she cannot escape.
Transformation / Return:
At the end of the novel, she repeatedly watches the sea. Although external reality has not changed, some stubborn persistence and faith have already formed within her. This is a silent spiritual transformation — “Though nothing can be changed, she is still unwilling to give up.”
This work transforms the mythic framework of the “Hero’s Journey” into the daily struggle of a lower-class woman. It is a modern narrative that writes the spiritual resistance of ordinary people from a microscopic perspective.
Example Two: Chen Yingzhen’s “The General’s Clan”
The protagonist is a young man from a military family who gradually distances himself from family and institutional systems because of struggles involving belief and class consciousness.
Departure:
A sense of superiority and privileged habits developed within a military family.
Trials and Crisis:
Facing the unequal distribution of wealth and the collapse of ideals in reality, his internal values begin to loosen.
Transformation and Return:
Leaving behind the power and authority symbolized by his general father, he chooses to practice justice through personal action. Like Huang Chunming’s works, this is also a transformative process “from leaving the family to reconstructing the self,” except that the background shifts from a prostitute to the descendant of elite military personnel, while equally demonstrating Taiwanese fiction’s profound portrayal of ordinary identity and moral choice.
Example Three: Wu Zhuoliu’s “The Orphan of Asia”
The protagonist Lin Wenxiu is a Taiwanese elite during the colonial period who wanders everywhere amid war and national transformation. Although he possesses the identity of an intellectual, his story is in fact a symbol of ordinary people’s consciousness, displaying the cultural rootlessness and process of identity reconstruction of being an “orphan of Asia.”
Departure:
Leaving his homeland because of study and anti-Japanese thought.
Trials:
Experiencing colonial education, self-exile, and cultural rupture.
Crisis and Revelation:
After Japan’s defeat and the transfer of Taiwan’s political authority, he feels completely alienated.
Return:
He ultimately returns to Taiwan and once again faces the land and historical responsibility.
Transformation:
He is no longer an agent of knowledge and power, but a spokesperson for the local homeland.
The hero’s journey in Taiwanese local fiction often ends with “the return of cultural identity” and “the restoration of the dignity of ordinary life,” expressing a profound connection to history and land.
Conclusion
Transformative Characteristics of Taiwanese Local Fiction:
The tragedies in Taiwanese local fiction are not the lofty fates of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama, but struggles rooted in ordinary people living under institutional oppression, colonial history, social marginalization, and economic imbalance. Protagonists often possess some “small hope” or the potential for human dignity, yet because they misjudge reality, mistakenly trust systems, or are trapped in circumstances they are powerless to resist, they collapse and ultimately move toward the destruction of life or dignity.
The “Hero’s Journey” in Taiwanese local fiction is essentially the difficult journey and silent protest of ordinary people. What they face are not dragons and magic, but institutions, fate, and the desolation of human hearts. From Huang Chunming to Chen Yingzhen, these novels write not glory and victory, but miniature epics resisting oblivion and confronting decline — the true hero is not the one who saves the world, but the soul that chooses not to surrender to fate even while dwelling in darkness.
- The Tragic Arc Archetype: Structural Collapse under the Fate of Ordinary People
Archetypal Structure:
Potential → Misjudgment / Flaw → Deepening Conflict → Collapse → Loss / Death
Aristotle’s tragic structure is transformed in Taiwanese local fiction into a kind of “ordinary people’s tragedy under structural oppression.” The destruction of characters does not originate from flaws in lofty character, but from institutional injustice, social discrimination, historical silence, and economic inequality. Such novels highlight human helplessness and ethical persistence under the crushing pressure of reality.
Example One: Wang Zhenhe’s “A Bullock Cart for Dowry”
The story depicts a rural couple who scramble everywhere to obtain a bullock cart for a wedding, ultimately losing themselves amid material concerns and human relationships, thereby exposing vanity under poverty, institutional unfairness, and family collapse.
Character Flaw:
Obsession with “face” and “tradition.”
Misjudgment of Fate:
Believing that possessing a bullock cart will bring a respectable marriage and social respect.
Tragic Explosion:
Forcing themselves to obtain the bride leads instead to family debt and emotional breakdown.
Emotional Release:
Readers experience profound pity and social criticism amid laughter and satire.
Conclusion:
Local tragic fiction often uses a tone of “tears within laughter” to depict the silent collapse of lower-class characters torn between traditional ethics and modern order, forming a kind of “cruel reality wrapped in humor.”
Example Two: Zhong Lihe’s “The Native Land”
The protagonist is a Taiwanese man who travels to Japan after the war to search for his missing Japanese wife. However, he encounters language barriers, identity discrimination, and emotional alienation, repeatedly colliding with obstacles within civilization and the marriage system, eventually returning to Taiwan with shattered dignity.
Potential / Call:
Persistence in love and the wish to rebuild a family.
Misjudgment:
Mistakenly believing that colonial civilization still possesses fairness, and also mistakenly believing that love can resist institutional barriers.
Conflict and Collapse:
Communication barriers, contradictions of national identity, and institutional obstacles surrounding interracial marriage gradually destroy his dignity and beliefs.
Completion of Tragedy:
Not only does the marriage fail, but he also becomes a “speechless person” outside the boundaries of civilized dialogue, symbolizing the identity predicament of Taiwanese people belonging nowhere amid colonial and postwar order.
The tragic quality of the novel does not arise from the protagonist’s pride or mistakes, but from the structural rupture jointly formed by history, culture, and language.
Example Three: Ye Shitao’s “Descendants of the Siraya Tribe”
The story depicts a young man’s process of searching for his roots. However, in his pursuit of cultural identity, he gradually discovers that his Indigenous bloodline has been buried beneath ethnic discrimination, historical forgetting, and land deprivation, forming a profound identity crisis.
Potential:
The pursuit of history and the dream of cultural return.
Misjudgment:
Believing that searching for roots can bring dignity and inner stability.
Conflict and Collapse:
Discovering that history has been silenced, ethnic groups assimilated, and traditional culture unable to establish itself in modern society.
Completion of Tragedy:
He becomes a marginalized person in modern society. “Searching for roots” instead causes him to lose connection with mainstream society while still failing to gain true belonging.
The novel points out that “historical amnesia” and “cultural exile” form the foundation of ordinary people’s tragedy, rather than the protagonist’s own choices.
Example Four: Huang Chunming’s “Sayonara · Goodbye”
The protagonist is a former Japanese-speaking soldier who is marginalized in postwar Taiwan and lives in hardship. When he mistakenly shouts “Sayonara” while bidding farewell to Japanese tourists, he instead becomes the object of social ridicule. This is a tragedy of “linguistic displacement” and historical memory dislocation.
Potential:
He once possessed glorious memories, understands Japanese, and tries hard to play the role of a friendly citizen.
Misjudgment:
Believing that Japanese can still connect emotions, without realizing the transformation of postwar language politics.
Collapse:
His expression of goodwill is misunderstood as “Japan worship” or “being out of touch with the times.”
Completion of Tragedy:
A single phrase, “Sayonara,” causes him to fall completely into speechlessness and loss of dignity under historical dislocation and ethnic pressure.
Such linguistic tragedy profoundly demonstrates how historical and identity ruptures erode ordinary individuals.
Conclusion:
The tragic arc in Taiwanese local fiction lies not in retribution caused by character flaws, but in “misjudging the goodwill of institutions” and “identity abandoned by history.” The tragedy of these ordinary characters lies in the fact that they clearly possess potential, emotion, and hope, yet are gradually crushed beneath the giant wheel of reality, ultimately becoming speechless, rootless, or stripped of dignity — this is precisely the localized transformation through which Taiwanese fiction renders the Greek tragic arc ordinary, structural, and historical.
- Multiple Plotlines: Interwoven Writing of Polyphonic Reality
Explanation of Narrative Technique:
Multiple plotlines (multi-strand narrative) refer to novels that contain more than one main storyline, instead consisting of several narrative lines that are parallel, intersecting, or complementary. These may involve different character perspectives, historical periods, or spatial settings. This technique enriches narrative layers, creates a polyphonic structure, and displays the tensions and dialectics among multiple experiences and values.
Transformative Characteristics in Taiwanese Local Fiction:
In Taiwanese local fiction, multiple plotlines are often used to present overlapping conditions involving history and modernity, ethnicity and class, individuality and collectivity. Such narration not only technically breaks the linear logic of single-line narration, but also reflects the multiple ruptures and layered memories of Taiwanese society.
Example One: Li Qiao’s The Cold Night Trilogy
This is a multi-line work combining historical narration and family narration, including Cold Night, Solitary Lamp, and Demons, spanning the experiences of different generations during different historical periods.
Narrative Line One:
The historical experiences of the older generation during Japanese rule and the early postwar period, involving colonialism, White Terror, and local identity.
Narrative Line Two:
The struggles of the middle generation amid political turmoil and land reform, reflecting contradictions between “ethnicity / locality” and “modernization.”
Narrative Line Three:
The confusion and rupture experienced by the younger generation amid urbanization and rising education.
These three narrative lines intertwine with one another, allowing history and the present to resonate together, forming a Taiwanese map of ordinary people that crosses generations, ethnic groups, and values.
Example Two: Ye Shitao’s “Red Shoes”
The novel takes as its main narrative line the story of a prostitute struggling at the margins of society, interwoven with side stories involving customers, police officers, journalists, politicians, and other figures around her.
Main Plotline:
The prostitute’s experience of humiliation by the police and the media exposes the oppression of gender and class.
Side Plotline One:
The calculations of利益 between police officers and their superiors reveal the coldness of the bureaucratic system.
Side Plotline Two:
The reporting process through which journalists sensationalize the prostitution scandal critiques media ethics.
These narrative lines intersect and unfold together, allowing readers not only to witness an individual tragedy, but also to see how the entire society collectively produces and sustains injustice.
Example Three: Huang Chunming’s “Two Painters”
What appears to be a simple village story actually contains a dual-line narrative structure:
Main Plotline:
Two painters take jobs in the countryside to make a living. Their lives appear leisurely, yet are in fact impoverished and helpless.
Subplot:
Through the interactions and conversations between villagers and the painters, the novel gradually reveals local class hierarchy, disparities in values, and the illusion of the “urban dream.”
Through dialogue, interpolated narration, and shifts in internal village perspectives, the novel outlines a multi-line narrative mode filled with class tension, intertwining ordinary people’s lives with social criticism.
Summary:
The use of multiple plotlines in Taiwanese local fiction is not merely a display of technical skill or structural experimentation, but rather an attempt to more closely approach the diversity and fractured nature of Taiwanese society. This narrative strategy enables novels to:
(1) Present the layered interweaving of history and individuality, collectivity and privacy;
(2) Establish readers’ empathy and comparative understanding toward the circumstances of different characters;
(3) Avoid the hegemony of a single narrative perspective and open space for plural interpretations.
Therefore, multiple plotlines become an important narrative practice through which Taiwanese novelists resist singular historical writing, class oppression, and cultural simplification. Taiwanese local fiction reconnects narrative archetypes to lived reality, transforming grand narratives into ethical trials and cultural self-reflection for historical little people, thereby opening a path toward a local narrative aesthetics that combines structural depth with emotional tension.
Summary: The Narrative Transformation and Local Aesthetics of Archetype Localization
Narrative Archetype
Characteristics of Western Archetypes
Transformative Characteristics in Taiwanese Local Fiction
Representative Works and Authors
Hero’s Journey
Mythic conquest, departure, trials, return, and enlightenment
Demythologized and ordinary-people-oriented, shifting toward inner individual struggle and miniature spiritual epics
Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea”: the inner transformation of a prostitute longing to reform and embrace motherhood
Tragic Arc
Lofty figures whose fate is destroyed because of character flaws
Ordinary people’s speechlessness and social defeat under structural oppression; tragedy originates from history and institutions
Zhong Lihe’s “The Native Land”: the disillusionment of an international marriage symbolizing the tragedy of colonial identity
Multiple Plotlines
Parallel progression of multiple main plots, intertwining of characters and time, multi-perspective narration
Presenting the polyphonic ruptures and layered memories of Taiwan’s ethnic groups, history, and class
Li Qiao’s The Cold Night Trilogy: the intertwining of history and identity among three generations
Ye Shitao’s “Red Shoes”: intersecting narration of social marginality and institutional dysfunction
Huang Chunming’s “Two Painters”: ordinary lives and disparities in values emerging through village conversations
This table more clearly presents:
The contrast between the classical Western structures of each archetype and their local Taiwanese transformations;
The integration of narrative techniques with socio-cultural meanings;
And more detailed identification of thematic and character layers in representative works, thereby presenting the local aesthetics of Taiwanese fiction.
Conclusion: The Three Core Questions of the Novel
From the perspective of narratology and narrative structure theory, when deeply examining the creation and reading of novels, the following three core questions are not only the starting points of textual analysis, but also the fundamental mechanisms of novelistic structural operation:
The Three Core Questions of the Novel: Deepened Interpretation through Narratology and Structuralism
Question — Theoretical Deepening and Applied Explanation from Narratology and Structuralism
- Who tells the story? (Who tells the story?)
☛ Narrator and Point of View
The narrator and point of view determine the range of information conveyed by the story, the emotional attitude, and the reader’s mode of empathy. Narratologist Gérard Genette distinguishes:
Narrative levels (extradiegetic / intradiegetic) — speakers outside or inside the story;
🔹Modes of narration (heterodiegetic / homodiegetic) — whether the narrator participates in the story;
🔹Focalization — whose perspective guides the way we see the world?
For example:
Zhong Lihe’s The Native Land adopts a limited third-person perspective, internalizing the protagonist’s psychology and creating the loneliness of an exile.
Huang Chunming’s “The Days of Watching the Sea” employs an observational perspective close to A-shui’s silent life, allowing emotion to emerge in a restrained yet profound manner.
Point of view is not merely “who speaks,” but “how it is spoken,” and “what is chosen to be spoken / not spoken,” controlling the focal distance and emotional lighting of narration.
- What happened, and why? (What happened, and why?)
☛ Plot Organization and Motivation Design
Plot is the organic organization of events, not merely the arrangement of events (story), but a causal chain and mechanism of turning points arranged through narrative strategy.
Narrative structuralism emphasizes:
(1) Basic arc: beginning → development → climax → turning point → ending;
(2) Plot-driving logic: conflict, choice, causality, delay, transformation;
(3) Motivation setting: whether characters’ behaviors possess internal logic or socially triggered conditions?
For example:
Wang Zhenhe’s “A Bullock Cart for Dowry” takes a marriage dispute as its central axis. Its plot is not merely conflict, but a gradual unveiling of motivational contradictions involving gender power and family values.
Li Qiao’s The Cold Night Trilogy uses family upheavals amid the tides of history as the driving force of the plot, linking systems of causality between individual trauma and collective migration.
A good plot is not merely “what happened,” but one that provokes questioning of “why did it happen this way,” thereby refining thematic meaning.
- How do characters change? (How do characters change?)
☛ Character Arc and Thematic Deepening
The process of character transformation is the intersection between character construction and thematic development. Structuralism regards the character arc as the “axis of transformation” within the novel, while narratology focuses on the variations of its psychological depth and semantic layers.
Common types of character arcs:
Positive arc: such as awakening and self-redemption;
Negative arc: such as corruption and disillusionment;
Static arc: such as repression, remaining unchanged yet being crushed by reality;
For example:
The heroine of Ye Shitao’s “Red Shoes” moves from youthful love toward sexual violence and speechlessness. This is a typical “negative arc,” presenting the tragedy of women being objectified under patriarchal society.
In Zhong Zhaozheng’s The Dull-Ice Flower, the father and the little boy undergo subtle yet profound changes that reflect the deep dialectics of the theme of injustice in Taiwanese rural education.
The transformation of characters often becomes the channel through which readers’ emotions and thematic consciousness “resonate.” Such resonance is the core of the artistic power of the novel.
Conclusion: The Three Core Questions as the Structural Skeleton of the Novel
These three questions are not isolated, but are entangled and interactive with one another:
The narrator determines how the story is seen and understood;
The arrangement of plot and motivation determines the rhythm and tension of the story;
And character transformation carries the emotional center and thematic depth of the novel.
From the perspective of narratology, these three respectively correspond to:
Narratological Dimension
Corresponding Question
Discourse
Who tells the story?
Story Layer
What happened? Why?
Theme & Character Arc
How do characters change?
字體：小 中 大
