Mai Jia's Fragmented Narrative Strategy —— Taking The Wind as an Example

Postmodernism advocates the idea of metafiction creation and zero-degree writing, because the world in the author's eyes is fragmented and chaotic, and the author can only show his own side. Usually, they deny the existence of center and structure, and can break through the traditional linear narrative structure without logical causality in the shaping of text and the promotion of plot, through weird characters; The development of the plot is chaotic, the content is incomplete and even inconsistent. Disassemble and disperse the complete story to achieve the effect of fragmentation.

When I was in college, under the influence of postmodern literary theory, I was full of interest in literary works, because such fragmented works were often like puzzles given to readers by the author, just like reading a series of mystery novels about the names of the Quinn brothers. At the end of every book, there will be a chapter that challenges readers. The answers to such puzzles will make people suddenly realize or be surprised, which will always make people feel relaxed and happy.

It's been three weeks since school started, and I've finished reading two spy novels by Mai Jia-Wind and Decryption. I am surprised that an author who is not a literature major is so proficient in the application of postmodern literary thoughts. If I go back to college, I may study Mai Jia as a representative of the multilingual mixed narrative structure paradigm of my novel. Of course, if you did, you wouldn't just read his two novels.

The presentation of literary forms is the symbolic encoding of the author's expression of meaning and emotion, and the process of the author's construction of his own order. Readers' reading is undoubtedly the decoding process of the author's literary form. In the encoding and decoding process of traditional linear narrative, readers will make mistakes between signifier and signified because of knowledge background, culture, aesthetics and other reasons, but compared with fragmented narrative, the latter will produce more multiple interpretations, over-interpretations and misreading.

Taking Mai Jia's Wind as an example, the novel is divided into three parts: east wind, west wind and still wind. Each part is interrelated, but there are contradictions in narrative. In the narrative process, the author not only uses the interview records from the first-person perspective, but also uses the third-person zero perspective and external perspective. Dongfeng part tells more about the process of Yuan Fei's interrogation and tracing the old ghost in Qiuzhuang from an external perspective, while Xifeng part adopts the first-person external perspective of interview records and recordings. It shows what Gu saw in Me and Gu's memories of Investigation of Old Ghosts. During this period, Gu explained how the old ghost in the novel delivered the message, but at the same time, he interspersed memories of past plots in his memories, which contradicted some contents of Dongfeng, causing readers' doubts and curiosity in the interpretation. The third part is the historical citation of several key intelligence personnel and Yuan Fei, with interview records and historical facts. The supplement to the previous narrative content has also created more contradictions and narrative gaps, much like the narrative structure of Rashomon written by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Everyone presents the same historical event from their own perspective, which leads the reader's serious plot to be broken down into independent and interrelated fragments, and the combination of each fragment will vary from person to person. It is precisely because of this that readers will keep thinking about why and who in the process of reading novels. The curiosity of reading has always been hung by the author, from beginning to end, and it is still memorable after hiding.

Perhaps, after reading the novel, we still have a lot of doubts in our hearts, but I want to say, don't have any regrets, because silence is far more than openness.