Ha Jin’s Ecocritical Irony in the Stylistic Analysis of the Personal Pronouns in “A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find”

Abstract

This paper aims at showing how stylistics and ecocriticism, both being strongly ‘centripetal’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ fields, can cooperate in the exploration of a literary text. This is the case of a short story written by the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Also thanks to the help of the digital analysis, the paper mainly focuses on the stylistic analysis of the personal pronouns and of the narrator’s point of view to show the stinging and subversive irony which pervades the narration of the vicissitudes of a Chinese TV film crew who is asked to shoot a scene where a muscular hero has to fight bare-handed against a real Siberian tiger. The analysis also aims to show how the story becomes the opportunity for the writer to depict the narrow frame of mind of the blind dictatorship of his homeland and its deplorable consequences on both humans and animals. Thus, the whole exploration, in the end, reveals the ecocritical lens through which Ha Jin narrates the story.

Keywords

• Digital stylistics. Ecocriticism. Ha Jin. Irony. Personal pronouns