Home > Explore Content > All Issues > Article View
Superstition and Existentialism: A Study of Luxun(魯迅)’s “The New-Year Sacrifice(祝福)”
The Journal of Chinese Cultural Studies
2020,
(47), pp.29-54
DOI : 10.18212/cccs.2020..47.002
Publisher : The Society For Chinese Cultural Studies
Research Area : Chinese Culture
DOI : 10.18212/cccs.2020..47.002
Publisher : The Society For Chinese Cultural Studies
Research Area : Chinese Culture
-
The study analyzed Lu Xun’s novel “The New-Year Sacrifice” in terms of the existence of life. The study found that when Lu Xun was writing a novel in his novel collection “Pang Huang,” his thoughts on the existence of life stood out, and that “The New-Year Sacrifice” was a representative work. In this study, the novel consists of two stories of “I” and “Xianglin,” and sees the three characters: “I” and “Xianglin” and “Lusiye.” In this study, I saw the confrontation between Xianglin and the Lusiye as the confrontation between “fake intellectuals(僞士)” and “superstition(迷信)” as Lu Xun described it, and Xianglin fell into despair as the faith of “fake intellectuals” denied Xianglin’s superstition. While existing research mainly focused on revealing the cause of the tragedy Xianglin went through, this study analyzes the confrontation between Xianglin and the Lusiye according to Lu Xun’s religious view, and analyzes the reason why the narrator ‘I’ can’t answer the questions Xianglin has asked. In this study, the reason the narrator is unable to answer Xianglin’s question is because he interpreted Xianglin’s question as an existential question of life. The narrator, who stands in the existential position of life, is in a position where he cannot give Xianglin any one answer. In this study, the reason the narrator is in a situation where he cannot answer if there is a soul or not, and he cannot answer because he interprets the question Xianglin asked in terms of the existence of Xianglin’s life while he sympathized with Xianglin’s tragedy. In this study, I analyzed that this predicament of the narrator reflected Lu Xun’s thinking at the time of writing the collection “Pang Huang”, and that he could not answer Xianglin’s question because he sympathizes with Xianglin not in terms of enlightenment or religious position but in terms of existentialism.
246 Viewed
Print this page
Download PDF