A description of a Shen Congwen novel in its early days - Based on first-person narrative

Shen Congwen is a contemporary Chinese novelist and prose writer who clearly shows his unique values and standards. Novels of Shen Congwen are closely associated with his experiences. Among them, works written using first-person narratives based on his personal experiences stand out. Most of his first-person narrative novels describe his childhood when he did not have a sense of reason, the scenery of an amiable and humane farming village, and his experience of suffering from poverty and longing for human affection after arriving at the city. Also, his writings are filled with his military life, which was fulfilled and free of confinement and restriction. It is probably because person-person narratives can create the greatest artistic effect of showing the honesty of the author. Novels of Shen Congwen use many first-person narratives because this method was chosen to deliver the author’s experiences to readers vividly. Since first-person narratives focus on the inner side or actions of the protagonist in novels, they have an additional effect of drawing the imaginative attention of readers to the time and space inside works. Therefore, first-person narrative novels of Shen Congwen can be seen as a very effective narrative strategy to win great sympathy and impress readers by focusing on his personal experiences. In other words, first-person narratives are examined as a narrative strategy to increase the honesty of stories inside novels and to gain sympathy and empathy with the narrator. In this sense, this paper aims to find out how Shen Congwen reproduces and arouses sympathy in first-person narrative novels written based on his personal experiences and to examine the narrative effects of first-person narratives that appear in his novels.