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Ni Huanzhi as a Failed Bildungsroman: The Paradox of Educational Ideals and the Exhaustion of the Modern Subject

  • Journal of Chinese Language and Literature
  • 2026, (102), pp.81~105
  • DOI : 10.15792/clsyn..102.202608.81
  • Publisher : Chinese Literary Society Of Yeong Nam
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Received : July 20, 2026
  • Accepted : August 13, 2026
  • Published : August 30, 2026

Yongtae Lee 1

1백석대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines Ye Shengtao’s Ni Huanzhi not as a conventional Bildungsroman, but as a failed Bildungsroman in which a modern intellectual committed to educational ideals is gradually exhausted through repeated confrontations with reality. While previous studies have discussed the novel in terms of the possibility of the Bildungsroman or the conflict between ideal and reality, this paper focuses on the paradoxical nature of Ni Huanzhi’s educational ideals. For Ni Huanzhi, education is not merely an occupation but a modern practice that promises self-realization, social reform, and the formation of a new human being. In this sense, his educational ideal reflects the optimistic faith in enlightenment shared by Chinese intellectuals after the May Fourth New Culture Movement. However, this ideal also functions ambivalently: it sustains him as a source of hope while driving him toward repeated frustration and exhaustion. To explain this paradox, this paper draws on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” Ni Huanzhi attempts to transform students, the school, and rural society through education. Yet his enlightenment discourse is repeatedly undermined by the inertia and cynicism of fellow teachers, class hierarchy among students, the organized power of society, and the violence of revolutionary politics. Thus, his collapse should not be understood as the result of personal weakness. Rather, it emerges from the repeated failure of educational hope when confronted with concrete historical and social conditions. Ultimately, Ni Huanzhi assumes the form of the Bildungsroman while refusing its logic of maturity and integration. Ni Huanzhi passes through school, family, society, and revolutionary space, but these experiences do not lead to self-realization or reconciliation with the world. Instead, they reveal the impossibility of realizing his educational ideals and lead to the exhaustion of the modern subject. In this sense, the novel gives literary form to the limits of May Fourth enlightenment optimism and the difficulty of forming a stable modern subject in modern Chinese history.

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