This paper takes the long novel Camel Xiangzi by contemporary Chinese writer Lao She as the research object, takes the body narrative as the research perspective, and analyzes the oppression and destruction of Xiangzi's “body”, “spirit” and “identity” by sorting out the three aspects of the city. By exploring the city's suppression and destruction of “body”, “spirit” and “identity”, the study focuses on the specific reasons for Xiangzi's failure to enter the city, and tries to further explore Lao She's reflections and thoughts on China's modernization process through Xiangzi's failure.
After reading the text carefully, it can be found that Xiangzi's life experience is not only the destiny given to him by the oppressive feudal system and the dark old society, but also the result of the city's oppression and destruction directly on his body, and there is a kind of mysterious narrative close to the myth and religion that always follows him. His body has gone through three stages: “perfect body of narcissism”, “suffering body of abstinence” and “ugly body of degradation”, from “self-love” to “self-love”, and from “self-love” to “self-love”, and from “self-love” to “self-love”. From “self-love” to “self-loathing” to “selfabandonment”, the three stages of “self-love” to “self-loathing” to “selfabandonment” have completely reproduced the grinding of the human body by the city. Therefore, from this point of view, Xiangzi's life experience of three ups and three downs after entering the city is actually a large-scale dispelling of the myth of the body, as well as the disintegration of Xiangzi's personal myth of the body.
In modern times, with the forced opening of China's door, the invasion of capitalism changed the millennia-old mode of production, in which all usable resources were quantified and reused over and over again. Xiangzi came to the city with his own desires and joined the market as a cheap, reusable labor force. Since then, all the resources that can be squeezed out of him, such as labor, sexual value, personal savings, etc., have been consumed by the surging urban desires. As a normal person with normal needs and desires, Xiangzi was able to keep all his desires within reasonable limits when he first came to the city, but after three ups and three downs, he lost his self-control and changed his formerly healthy attitudes toward work, sex, and money to become extremely crazy. At the same time, his normal desire to succeed and become better was also exhausted, and he became a beast devoured by desire. It can be said that the collapse of Xiangzi's personality is the result of the successful invasion of urban desire.
The city's crushing of Xiangzi is also reflected in the denial of his identity. Xiangzi, as a cheap laborer in the city, is always a marginal person, and when he tries to cross the boundary and become a partaker of the city's benefits, the city will mercilessly cut his seat and punish him. Xiangzi's complex feelings of love and hate for the city, which he reveals inadvertently, ultimately leads to the confusion and embarrassment of his identity. Since modern times, China and Beijing, which are facing transformation, are also in the same awkward position as Xiangzi, forcing modernity to unfold, making Beijing, once the political center, and China, once considered as the center of the world, lose their old identities, and have to embark on a long process of groping for and awkwardly reconstructing themselves. Lao She saw Xiangzi's embarrassment, and likewise saw the plight of Beijing and China. Through Xiangzi's failure, he alluded to the incomplete modernization of China, reflecting his reflection and thinking on the process of China's modernization as a national writer.