Abstract
By reading Zhang Dachun's stories from the 1980s to 1999, this essay investigates the ways by which urban space influences the writing style of urban fiction. First of all, the fragmented narrative form of urban stories reflects the segmentation of urban space. Living in such segmental spaces, residents' vision of others have been circumscribed, whereas the omnipresent narrator of urban literature maps out the totality of urban conditions, compensating the urban readers' limited human senses. Secondly, the inevitable interaction between residents, due to their physical proximity, transforms the city into a field of contingency where no one can foresee and take responsibility for what one has caused upon the other. Everyone lives in an endless chain of cause and effect, but the whole picture can never be conceived. Thirdly, because of the death of public space, the superficial interactions among urbanites often lead to stereotyping one another. The mechanism of stereotyping in urban stories thus creates ?flat characters? and produces melodramatic encounters or what the writer Raban has called ?urban melodramas.? Finally, this essay argues that the versatility of Zhang Dachun's writing style reflects the heterogeneity of urban space and the fluid identity of urbanites.