The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”

Abstract This paper sets out to examine how the first-person plural narration form is used in diasporic Chinese American writer Yiyun Li’s short story “Immortality” to represent the collective loss of subjectivity – namely how she represents the consequences of that loss from a psychological perspective as part of her experiment in artistic innovation. It explores Li’s characterization – especially her realistic depiction of the collective narrators’ psychology under totalitarianism and how she allows their psychology to affect the form of her representation. I argue that although through the ventriloquy in English, Li has given the “we”-narrators a discursive voice to articulate their hidden thoughts and feelings – something not possible in their mother tongue, the “we”-narrators are unable to exceed their existential limitations to speak a purely personal language immune from official appropriation. Li’s story also underlines the extreme form as well as the emotional consequences of that collective loss of subjectivity, namely the “we”-community’s avoidance of mass melancholia in reaction to the tragic end of their compatriot victim of the dictatorship in order to preserve their prevailing collective ego-ideal.1