Chapter Three provides the content of the unlived life. Through the rewriting of history as haphazard events, writers question both the knowledge of the past and its representation. It is placed in fictions of change, especially historiographic fiction. The second chapter discusses the context of the unlived life: discontinuity. To many of these characters to have been born is the greatest dilemma of life. The unlived life is a wasted life of missed opportunities, opportunities never had, premature death, the inability to position oneself. As a literary theme, the comprehensiveness of discontinuity, fragmentation, and unrepresentability translate into the motif of the unlived life. In post-Mao fiction postmodern alienation appears at its worst. At its worst, it is an alienation from life itself. At its best, postmodern alienation is delayed accommodation. Ihab Hassan names three main attributes of postmodern alienation: discontinuity, fragmentation, and Lyotard’s concept of unrepresentability.

Postmodern alienation signifies the correlation of postmodern socio-cultural change and individual experience.

Only very recently has the concept of alienation been resuscitated as postmodern alienation. The first chapter introduces the concepts of alienation and postmodernism and gives an assessment of the field and the theme to date. It is an almost unanimous opinion of readers and critics alike that these writers offer a counterhegemonial assessment of China’s past and present alike. The principle authors of this discussion are Liu Heng, Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Mo Yan, all of whom are writers of the so-called ‘new generation’ (wan shengdai). This project addresses the concept of postmodern alienation in post-Mao Chinese fiction, especially fiction published after 1985.

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