The Three Trios, a novel written by Chinese author Ning Wen and first published in 2014, is the first-ever literary work written in the style of ultra-unreal. The novel is unique in its use of two different text types, i.e., the plain text and the footnotes, the latter of which Ning Ken uses not only to give short explanations but also as a vehicle of the narrative. The novel interweaves four different narrative layers, and is hugely intertextual, quoting literary and scientific works ranging from the Chinese classic The Book of Changes to the ideas of the French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In this master thesis, I have focused on the links between the novel The Three Trios and Baudrillard’s work The Perfect Crime, which Ning Ken quotes several times throughout the novel. Ning also comments on Baudrillard’s ideas, which are present predominantly in one of the novel’s four narrative layers, the layer dealing with the suffering of Juyan Ze, a character interrogated by the avant-garde artist Fang Weiwei under the guidance of the secret group ZAZ. The central thesis of this work is that the ideas presented in The Perfect Crime are alluded to several times in The Three Trios. The connections between the two works are present in three thematic areas – perfect crime, reality, and art.
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