Narratives about family and the Novel "Family" by Chinese Writer Zhang Wei

Abstract

The family is a narrative socio-historical entity. By “narrated entity”, I mean that people know the history and existence of the family through verbal memory. In other words, after and in parallel with verbal memory, any history that exists is written history. This observation allows us to distinguish between forms of family narrative, such as genealogy and history. But written memory, in addition to “real records”, also takes the form of fictional narrative. Fictional narrative is also a way for people (members of the family generation chain) to understand their own memories. In this paper, we raise the question of investigating the common forms of family narrative in Eastern and Western cultural history and literature. In terms of the narrative form of the novel, this paper chooses to take the novel “Family” by the Chinese writer Zhang Wei as an example for introduction.