Nam Cao let the character dialogue thoroughly, dialogue to the end about all issues so that the character's self-conscious drama would explode in the answer in the final monologue: "Dien cannot dream. The cruel truth is always there. The truth kills the romantic dreams that sow in Dien's mind the literature of the idle. Dien wants to escape the truth, but how can he escape? Dien's wife suffers, Dien's children suffer, Dien's parents suffer. Dien himself suffers. How many more people, in the same situation, suffer like Dien! Suffering withers a large part of people's beautiful personalities... Dien doesn't need to go anywhere. Dien doesn't need to escape, Dien just stands in suffering, opens his soul to receive all the vibrations of life" [18,233] .
Sharing the same fate as Dien, Ho in The Surplus Life also dreamed of success in his literary career, but that dream was crushed by the worry of food and clothing. But if Dien only fell into one tragedy, the tragedy of a writer, Ho had another tragedy, the tragedy of love. Ho longed for a Nobel Prize-winning work, but in order to make money, Ho wrote bland, meaningless works. And Ho suffered. That was the first tragedy. Ho looked at his own tragedy and blamed himself, calling himself “miserable”, “dishonest”, “vile”. Ho exclaimed in pain: “Miserable! Miserable is him! Because he is a bastard! He is a scoundrel! Carelessness in any profession is a scoundrel. But carelessness in literature is truly despicable” [18,267]. Here, Nam Cao calls the character “he” so the reader can easily mistake it for the author’s voice, not the character’s. But in fact, this is a genuine internal dialogue of the character Ho. In this dialogue, Ho did not hesitate to expose all his mistakes as a writer. Ho
self-analyze, evaluate, dissect one's feelings, aspirations and even disappointments when writing worthless works.
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In addition to the desire to become a successful writer, Ho also wanted to “support others on his shoulders”, Ho wanted to use love to save the miserable. Therefore, Ho married Tu and had a family. Ho was willing to sacrifice his literary career to take care of the family that Ho built from love. But then Ho continued to fall into tragedy. Ho did not have enough money to support himself and his family, Ho scolded and tormented his wife and children. And when he understood, Ho felt more miserable than ever, Ho blamed and tormented himself. Ho recognized and said to himself in so much pain and sorrow: “What is more painful for someone who still longs to do something to improve the value of his life, but in the end can do nothing, just worrying about food and clothing is tiring enough? He left his wife and children to suffer?” He gave up, he abandoned them, he sacrificed himself as people say? A few times he had seen the above thought flash through his mind. And he thought of the eloquent saying of a philosopher: “One must know how to be evil, how to be cruel in order to live strongly... But he also thought: “From being very lovable, very pitiful, he can sacrifice love, a very selfish love, but he cannot abandon compassion, perhaps he is weak, cowardly, mediocre, but he is still human: he is human, not a monster driven by ego” [18,268] .
This monologue mixed with internal dialogue revealed all the deepest thoughts and concerns of an intellectual in Ho. Ho's language in the dialogue is the language of "two voices" (M. Bakhtin) arguing and conversing with each other. In the first voice, Ho feels sorry for his fate of "not being able to do anything, just worrying about food and clothing is tiring enough". Ho questions his own conscience, asks himself: can "he" "recklessly abandon", "abandon", "leave his wife and children alone", can "he" be "evil", "cruel" once "to live strong".
But in the second voice, Ho himself contradicts himself in the first voice because deep in his consciousness, Ho understands that: "he is not ordinary" and "he is still human". Two thoughts, two tones in one person Ho make the inner dialogue become dramatic, attractive to readers. It shows that Nam Cao's sharp pen has touched even the deepest, most mysterious parts of humanity.
Like Dien in Giang Sang , Ho in Doi Thua , Dien in Nuoc Mat is also an intellectual. And Dien also became "cruel" and "ruthless" because of his wife, children, and worries about food and clothing. There was a time when Dien told himself that he would go somewhere and live alone, "let whoever dies be their own damned selves". But then after his anger, Dien returned to himself - a man who loved his wife and children. From the bottom of his heart, Dien spoke words of love and affection: "Now in his heart there was only pity. He loved his wife, loved his children, loved all those who suffered" [18,332].
It can be seen that the common point of Nam Cao's intellectual characters is that the characters are placed in the process of alienation and self-consciousness to overcome alienation. Therefore, the use of monologues and internal dialogues has brought great effectiveness to Nam Cao's works. Readers seem to live in the endless thoughts of the characters. Many times, readers are even "fooled" by the author because they mistakenly think that they are the author's thoughts. However, when the monologues and internal dialogues end with the answer to the self-conscious drama, the reader realizes that they are not the author's thoughts but the words and thoughts of the character. If the author's words and thoughts exist, they have merged with the character's words. That is the success of Nam Cao's narrative art.
Nam Cao's characters are immersed in the trivial, petty worries of daily life and then fall into the process of degeneration. Degeneration
takes place in the character's soul, forcing the character to struggle with it to find himself. At those times, the character must face himself, argue with himself, then justify and explain himself to escape the situation. Also taking place in that order, however, Akutagawa's characters have a more complex process of degeneration and self-awareness. It is difficult to mold Akutagawa's characters into a certain situation. But like Nam Cao, the self-awareness of Akutagawa's characters is portrayed through very typical monologues and internal dialogues. The short storyThe Murder of the Century of Light is a work about the confession of a doctor named Kitabatakê. This character committed a murder and left a letter as a true confession. Therefore, the whole story is a long series of monologues and internal dialogues of the character about the act of murder. In general, this character's train of thought is divided into two stages: Before and after committing the crime. Here is an internal monologue explaining Kitabatake's motive for killing (before committing the crime):
“...How could I ever forget that despicable debauched man who had indulged himself on the mat, with one hand holding an old prostitute and the other a young girl as young as a flower bud just blooming... My God! It was then, that evening, as we watched the artillery fire from the Manbati restaurant, that I felt compelled to kill him. I knew that it was not simply jealousy that drove me to kill Mixumura – no, indignation dominated my thoughts, my hands, because I wanted to punish depravity, restore justice... I understood that his existence was destroying morality, was threatening morality, and that to destroy him was to help the old and bring peace to the young. And at that moment, within me, the determination to kill Mixumura gradually became a concrete plan” [1,92-93] .
In this monologue, we are reminded of the character Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment . If Raskolnikov killed an old loan shark not only for money for himself and his loved ones but also to get rid of "a cockroach, a dirty louse that sucks blood and pus" from others to demand equality in society, then here, Kitabatake is the same. The doctor kills people not simply because of jealousy but also to reclaim "morality" , to reclaim "justice" for society. In an internal dialogue mixed with monologue, Kitabatake expressed all his deepest thoughts and feelings. It was both jealousy and anger, hatred for a scum in society. Then the flow of emotions was pushed to a climax, the decision to kill. But after the murder happened and Kitabatakê was found innocent before the law, new thoughts came to the character. Kitabatakê himself did not know whether to be sad or happy about Mixumura's death because his cousin would marry the Count. Let's look at another of Kitabatakê's inner monologues:
“Was I happy? Was I sad? I couldn’t even describe it myself. There was some indescribable, intense emotion that enveloped me and didn’t allow me a moment of peace. There was a bottle of champagne on the table… And right there was the box containing those very pills. It seemed that both the devil and the gods had decided to share my unusual meal with me” [1,96].
It is clear that a new motive for murder has appeared in Kitabatakê. The image of the pills has divided the character into two opposites, “devil” and “god”. Kitabatakê’s inner current at this time seems to be in a fierce struggle to choose one of the two. And then, coincidentally, later on, Kitabatakê had many opportunities to make the Count use the pills, but his conscience did not allow Kitabatakê to act. Kitabatakê
had to go through indescribable pain and struggle in his soul. The constant questioning of his conscience made the character awaken and painfully self-conscious: “In order not to kill the Count, I must kill myself” [1,100] . The story ends when the character’s monologue ends. Here, what makes the story “suffocating” is not the plot of the story but the unexpected development of the character’s psychology. This characteristic shows the uniqueness of Akutagawa’s narrative style.
Dialogue in the Dark is the last short story that shows Akutagawa's special narrative style. Because just like the title of the story, the entire short story is a long dialogue between two characters, "the voice" and "I". The story has no narrator, the beginning of the story is the question of the "voice", then the answer of "I" and so on alternately until the end of the story. In fact, this is a comprehensive and thorough internal dialogue of Akutagawa with himself before he committed suicide. Akutagawa split himself into an "other person" to question, dissuade, even provoke, joke, and challenge himself about all the issues that have happened and are happening in the writer's life and thoughts. For example, in a dialogue, Akutagawa mentioned death, life, love and selfishness... like this:
Voice: - Your arrogance is killing you.
Me: - Sometimes I think like this: maybe I'm not one of those people who will die in my bed.
Voice: - Like you're not afraid of death? Right?
Me: - I'm afraid of death. But dying is not difficult. I've put a noose around my neck more than once...
Voice: - Then why don't you die? Is it true that in the eyes of everyone, you are not a criminal from the legal point of view?
Me: - I agree with that. Same as Verlen, Varnhe or Strinberg.
Voice: - But you have done nothing to atone for your sins.
Me: - I'm doing it. There is no greater atonement than suffering. Voice: - You are an incorrigible scoundrel.
Me: - Rather I am a virtuous person... Voice: - Then maybe you are a fool Me: - Yes. Maybe I am a fool...
.............
Voice: - You despise love. However, now I see that from beginning to end you put love above all else.
Me: - No. Right now I absolutely do not put love above all else. I am a poet. An artist.
Voice: - Didn't you leave your father, mother, wife, and children for love?
Me: - You're lying. I left my father, my mother, my wife, my children just for myself. Voice: - That means you're a selfish person.
Me: - Sorry, I am not a selfish person. I want to be a selfish person” [1,330-331].
In other short stories ( The Sufferings of Hell, Kesa and Morito ...), Akutagawa also built his characters in the spirit of letting the characters become fully aware of all their problems through internal dialogues and monologues. Therefore, Akutagawa's short stories are often "poor" in details but "rich" in psychology. In those works, the writer also puts in the opposing psychological lines of one or more characters to clarify the complicated, winding, and difficult-to-explain hidden inhibitions of the human soul.
* Summary:
The self-conscious character is a typical creation of 19th century Western literature. Nam Cao and Akutagawa inherited and incorporated this type of character into their works, at the same time turning it into an effective narrative method. Although each writer has a different way of constructing it, in general, the self-conscious character type of Nam Cao and Akutagawa is expressed in two types of characters that often appear in the short stories of the two writers: characters from the bottom class and intellectual characters. Each of these types of characters has its own psychological life, so the process of self-consciousness of the character is also very different. Through research, we found that: The typical artistic aspect that both Nam Cao and Akutagawa used to portray the self-conscious character in their works is the character language, including: external language (direct dialogue language) and internal language (monologue and internal dialogue). In particular, with the form of monologue and internal dialogue, Nam Cao and Akutagawa have created a favorable "journey" to explore the complex and mysterious inner world of humans (characters). The writers do not only see humans as a "silent object" but also consider humans as a "microcosm" that is unknown, unpredictable and needs to be explored and understood. Those people are always interacting with circumstances to freely express their inner selves and self-awareness. By successfully portraying self-aware characters, the pens of Nam Cao and Akutagawa have reached the pinnacle of narrative art compared to writers of the same period.