The Year of the Dog, published by Grass on 1963, is a masterpiece reflecting the performance of ordinary citizens during the Nazi occupation. Glass thinks that the stimulation of fascism and the drive of evil human nature have caused serious harm to the world, which is almost a devastating blow. This idea mainly tells the story of Hitler's pet dog "Prince" in "The Year of the Dog" and the "Year of the Dog" in which Matern-style common people's humanity swelled during Nazi rule. When talking about Germany under fascist rule, the author used the word "Year of the Dog" many times. After careful analysis, this seemingly absurd logic is not absurd, because irrationality, as the common ground between "dog" and fascism, closely combines the two. Under the domination of this irrational force, absurd things and atrocities will happen. What is really sad lies not only in these abnormal phenomena themselves, but also in "people's insensitive, sympathetic and even eager attitude towards them" like the protagonist Matern. In addition, the work describes the rapid development of German economy on the ruins after the war, and exposes some people's thoughts of trying to cover up war crimes. A sharp and profound point in the Year of the Dog is the detailed description of cover-up, lies and deception. History has proved that it is unwise for those who participated in Nazi evil to try to cover up history and leave only lies. By trying to erase the past history with a big eraser, Matern made people who had participated in Nazi evil arrogantly refuse to review their own evil deeds, and did not want future generations to know their past behavior. There are many such people after the war of characters. I want to cover up and falsify history, hoping that the new generation will know nothing about the Nazi history of their elders. After time passes, I want to put all the responsibility on the Nazis. Because of the current situation, individuals are often reluctant to stand up and take responsibility. By shaping Matern, an artistic model who wants to cover up his disgraceful history, the author shows that a rational and conscientious German should constantly review himself and remove the fascist poison from his roots in introspection and repentance. Gunter grass, a German contemporary writer, has broken the literary framework of modernism, and it is difficult to define the essence with various literary stereotypes such as absurdity, surrealism and black humor. However, his creation embodies the true original genius and highlights the innovation of novel narratology in the 20th century. The Year of the Dog shows the writer's concern for real politics in content and has modernity in writing techniques.
First, the dynamic diversity of narrators and narrative perspectives
The narrator is the narrator of the narrative text, the "voice" embodied in the text, and has the nature of taking language as the main body. The narrator is different from the author, it just narrates the events that happened ... the author created the narrator, and the narrative style is also the narrator's style. "Shuo" comes from the narrative subject, that is, the narrator, and the narrator's "Shuo" is bound to be related to "seeing" or "observing". That is to say, when describing scenes, events, people, etc. In narrative texts, there is always a perspective or observation point to look at all this. Through this perspective or observation point, everything you see will be presented, and "they" will be spoken by the same or different narrators. Specifically, in the creation of the Year of the Dog, there are not one narrator, but three. They tell the stories of several characters with different narrative voices and different narrative perspectives within the agreed time limit. The structure seems loose, but there are internal relations between the parts.
This book is divided into three parts. The first part, narrated by Blauch Searle, tells the friendship between Amzel and Matern in youth from 19 17- 1927 and the story of 32 early shifts written by Blauch Searle, the mine owner. In the second Love Letter, the narrator is Tula's cousin Liebennau. He writes according to Brauch Searle's suggestion, and tells what happened during the Nazi period by writing a love letter to his cousin Tula. Ribenu is a countryman of Amsel and Matern. At this time, the narrator participates in the story and is the character in the story. On the one hand, the narrator tries to observe things from Libenau's perspective, on the other hand, he retains the freedom to describe events. So this part uses the perspective of first-person witness to describe the three lines of story development. The first clue is the breakdown of the relationship between Anzel and martel En: Aansel, who has a great talent for singing since childhood and is good at making scarecrows, was beaten by nine stormtroopers because his father was Jewish, and all his teeth were knocked out, including his good friend martel En. Amsel had to leave his hometown under the pseudonym "Haseloff" and become a ballet dancer in Berlin. But Matern left the stormtroopers a year later for stealing, and his heart was full of contradictions and pains for Amzel. The second clue is the relationship between Yan Ni and Tula: Yan Ni's adoptive father died after being put into a concentration camp because of Tula's accusation, and then went to Berlin to dance ballet with Haseloff, and his legs were disabled in the air raid. The third thread is the family history of dogs: Matern's bitch "Senta" gave birth to "Haalas" and was bought home by Libernau's father. One of her dogs, named Prince, was selected by the Nazi organization in Danzig and became the Fuehrer's favorite dog, which made the dog's hometown famous. 1945, the Germans were defeated, and the "Prince" became a deserter and swam across the Elbe River to the west. When the first-person narrator "I" tells this process, he does not always face the implied readers, but often turns to the protagonist who is not present, and uses the second person to call "you" to talk directly with Tula. Of course, due to the absence of the protagonist, this kind of dialogue can only be one-way and full of subjective colors, but it is precisely because it is one-way and subjective that it highlights the self-awareness of the narrative subject in the process of retrospective narration. For Glass, while exposing the fact that fascism tortured and destroyed innocent people's bodies, it emphasized its poison and destruction to people's hearts. The third novel, The Experience of Matern, is narrated by Matern from the limited perspective of the third-person fixed figure, with the time from 1945 to 1957. The plot follows the last one: The lost dog "Prince" finds martel En released from the British "anti-Nazi camp" and is inseparable from him. Martel En "took the black dog and the list engraved on his heart, spleen and kidney", looking for stormtroopers, Nazi officers, field gendarmes and special court jurors who had forged resentment in those years, waiting for an opportunity to get back at them and their wives and daughters, euphemistically calling them "non-Nazis". With the arrival of the "economic miracle", people began to forget the past. Matern bought a big eraser and "began to erase all the names on the revenge list". Later, he was "tired of capitalism, militarism, revanchism and the old Nazi infiltrated West Germany" and wanted to escape to East Germany. He met his boyhood friend Amsel in West Berlin. It turned out that he was the "mine owner". Blauch Searle used an old mine to make scarecrows in various countries' political life to show human feelings. The end of the novel is thought-provoking: Matern followed Brauch Searle to watch the production process of the Scarecrow and the farce that the Scarecrow reappeared in the hellish mine. Back on the ground, they took a bath together in a bathtub filled with alkaline water. The "prince" who was once loved by Hitler became the watchdog of "mine". Throughout the three parts of the novel, three narrators representing different identities and positions witness history with their own experiences and eyes, communicate with readers with different narrative voices, and use analysis and reflection to urge people to learn from history, distinguish right from wrong in reality, and eliminate the stupidity of civilized society.
Second, multiple narratives in absurdity.
Multiple narration means that an event only happens once and is described many times. Multiple narratives in traditional texts do not emphasize the event itself, but different people's descriptions of the same event and different views of the characters. However, the multiple narratives in the Year of the Dog are not only different from the purpose of multiple narratives in traditional texts, but also shrouded in a layer of absurdity. It is not simple repetition, but enrichment, not staying at the level of the plot, but the sublimation of the subject. For example, the story of Matern throwing the knife that Amzel gave him into the sea, the description of Jews without souls in otto weininger's Sex and Character is constantly reappeared in the case of Amzel and his son, and the story of Amzel being beaten by nine masked stormtroopers in a snowmelt weather is repeated many times in the article. When nine masked men attacked Amzel, the reader didn't know why or why. Amzel was buried in the snowman. After coming out, he immediately became slim and became Haseloff's "golden mouth". The whole story was until after the war, when martel took revenge everywhere in China and tried the so-called "non-Nazism". After Matern's daughter Wally put on "magic glasses" for observation, Matern and Jinkou reunited. The truth and meaning of the plot are clear in many narratives. Of course, literature is not history, but Grass's works give people a profound and shocking aesthetic effect that history can't compare with through seemingly absurd, true and unreal, real and vivid perceptual images. Under the influence of the Nazis, Matern lost his humanity and punched and kicked his former friends, which made readers deeply regret the actions of Amzel and Matern in his absurd narrative. This is especially true of the reference to Weininger's book. In his works, he repeatedly emphasized that Jews do not sing, do not engage in sports activities and have no soul. However, Amzel's father is an excellent young man. He organized a gymnastics association in Bernsack and became a tenor in the choir. Amzel's artistic talent and kind actions deeply touched the readers' hearts. It can be seen that glass is here in a cold style and is not bound by any moral norms. Unconstrained by political beliefs, he quietly exposed Nazi tyranny and barbarism, as well as various evils and failures in German social life, and expressed deep sympathy for the Jewish nation and people, full of human brilliance.
In addition, the narrative technique of the Year of the Dog also transcends the stylistic boundaries, such as adopting the form of epistolary, Matern's publicly discussed story being narrated in the form of public discussion, and the last part of Love Letter also begins with "Once upon a time there was a ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Metafiction is another artistic landscape in postmodern literature. It is called "a novel about fiction" and has the characteristics of reflexivity. This kind of novels constantly appear as fictional works, and their authors often have multiple identities such as narrator, protagonist and author, and often freely enter and leave the works to comment on the theme and plot of the works. For example, "Brauch Searle can write on the well again. The date of February 4th proved only one advantage: all three manuscripts were completed on schedule. Blauch Searle can sort the love letters of young Harry Libernau and store them in his morning bag. In the future, he will pile up the confessions of actors in "Morning Shift" and "Love Letter". If the postscript is worth writing, Brauch Searle will write it, because he is in charge of the mine and the writing team, he pays in advance, he decides the completion date, and he has to review the proofs. " "In this way, after three working meetings, we reached an agreement to connect Brauch Searle's Six o'clock in the morning with Harry Libenau's Love Letter with a transition. This is the transition. Tula Bocquery Fogg was born in1June, 927 1 1 day ... "These are subversive questions about the content of the story that has been told. If the narrator of traditional novels tries to hide himself in his works, then modernist and post-modernist novels try their best to show their fiction and absurdity and restore the fiction of novels. Its purpose is to reveal the relationship between novel and reality from a brand-new level, so as to put forward how human beings should know the basic problems of the world in a special way. Corresponding to Grass's Year of the Dog, superb narrative skills guide readers to reflect on society, human morality and Germany's disgraceful and shameful history. In the Year of the Dog, a series of mythical images symbolizing death and hell demons were used. The purpose is to metaphor "the history of falling into the devil" and expose the dark social reality of the devil under Nazi Germany. The application of myth expands the connotation of the works, enriches the content level, and urges people to re-examine history and reflect on the causes of evil. In addition, Grass also hinted through myth that evil still accompanies mankind today, and the author used this to warn the world not to make the same mistake again.