Underground Reading and Existentialism in the Swaying Seventies: An Analysis of the Narrative Prose Style of Bei Dao's Waves

Abstract

In the 1970s, the private reading of so-called "Yellow Cover Books" and "Grey Cover Books" constructed a specific intellectual sphere. The internal circulation and reading of translated Western modernist works,particularly existentialist ones, were “swaying” in the face of enormous social pressure.This construction of a very harsh environment is echoed in Bei Dao’s novel Waves , whose main character similarly encounters physical sensations of thirst,heat and contraction generate its peculiar narrative prose style. In this paper we analyze the text taking into account both the historical situation and the author’s biography,integrating a consideration of its special literary and historic interest with diffe.