ABSTRACT
In his memoir Three Brothers: Memories of My Family, Yan Lianke portrays the lives of the Yan family as embodying the fate of Albert Camus’ Sisyphus—enduring a lifetime of hardship to return to nothingness at the end. The Sisyphean fate of the Yan family blends reality and myth into a new type of mythorealism and reflects Yan's existential despair. In Three Brothers and Dream of Ding Village, modern China's historical traumas enable characters to understand the universal truths of existential meaning and meaninglessness and the absurd condition of living just to die. Yan's views on life and fate as expressed in Three Brothers allow a new interpretation of Dream of Ding Village that connects the fictional absurdity to the lived experience of Chinese modernity. His recognition of his family's dignified response to the cruelty of fate echoes the courageous stance to confront certain death taken by characters in Dream of Ding Village. In both memoir and fiction, Yan combines reality and absurdity to portray lived historical traumas as a process of reflecting on existential despair and truths.
