Exodus and Return— Self-Exploration in Novelist Wang Dingguo's Essay Collection Exploring the Road  Author: Ya-Li Huang ( Institute of Sinophone Studies, National Tsing Hua University, Professor )

Vol.&No.：Vol. 69, No. 2
Date：September 2024
Pages：99-134
DOI：https://doi.org/10.6210/JNTNU.202409_69(2).0005

Abstract：
It is widely recognized that writers can and should be versatile. Observing the contemporary literary scene from the perspective of genre creation, some writers have double or multiple cross-domain writing. Although the prose has a very small part in novelist Wang Dingguo’s creation, and at the same time has less performance in the writer’s later period of resumption of writing, it is the earliest genre that he started to operate. Looking back at Wang Dingguo’s prose writing history, he has published Day of the Chrysanthemums in the Fine Rain, Asking for Love Across the Water, and later on, his book on business and war, Entrepreneur, No Home: The Love and Hate of a Taiwanese Businessman, and his political observation Worrying About the Nation: A Hundred Days of Huge Changes in Taiwan, and then, in 2017, his book Exploring the Paths to explore his own life’s footsteps, which shows how he has been on a journey of “leaving the scene” and “coming back” from the world of literature. It reminder that the novelist’s prose, with its open heart and contemporary concern, cannot be ignored. We can find that “searching” is an important theme in Wang Dingguo’s creation. This article first reviews Wang Dingguo’s prose at various stages, and then, based on his recent work Pathfinding, explores the realization of his sense of solitude in his works, so as to further understand Wang Dingguo’s journey of “searching”. In this paper, we see the writer as a searcher, and use his ups and downs in the pursuit of his ideal life as the main line, and the process of his return from confusion as the supplementary line, to explore how he accomplished the transcendence and integration of his two identities step by step, and to reflect on the proposition of “searching for oneself”. It is believed that this kind of excavation is of great value to our understanding of the writer’s motivation and consciousness of life.

Keywords：Wang Dingguo, exodus, return, sense of solitude, modern prose, search

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