Abstract
Lin Yiyun excels at using comedy and farce as a form of writing. Outwardly, his writings appear to consist of absurd banter, but in fact, they adhere closely to social realities and keenly follow political trends; there is a host of taunts and criticisms between the lines that shows his profound fascination with these trends. In particular, the author in his novels reveals an astonishing insight of Taiwan’s social and political circumstances. Both the life story of a nobody in an obscure back corner of society as well as news events reported by unbridled newspapers and magazines have become creative themes for Lin’s novels. To better understand Lin’s concerns and preoccupations about Taiwanese society in the world of his novels, this paper discards the stereotypical limitations of past studies of his novels and adopts a thematic approach to research, placing “political concerns” and “allegorical methods” at the core of its conceptual development. Through the exploration of three different forms of Lin’s writing—“the novel as political satire,” “the novel as a disaster fable,” and “writing from historical imagination”—this paper does an indepth study of the various aspects of the “political concerns” in Lin’s novels. It also discusses the “allegorical method”—which the author handles so well—and how the method exhibits within these three forms of writing. The sort of aesthetic sense that emerges from a detailed investigation of these forms of expression in Lin’s novels is also investigated. Such a scrutiny of the forces in the triangular relationship between politics, human nature, and power brings out the creative approach and value choices in Lin’s works.