Gaze of the Other and Subject Alienation: Centering on Novel Welcome to the World

Abstract

Bi Feiyu's new novel Welcome to the World, published in 2023, focuses on the urology department of the city's First Hospital during the SARS period, and tells the story of the protagonist Fu Rui's mental breakdown and galloping toward madness with a medical accident. Fu Rui has been living under the established arrangements of others since birth, is a pursuit of perfection of the "good life" image, as if an "exception" dissociated from the reality of the world, but the resulting is the constant internalization of high requirements under the gaze of others. After the successive failure of the operation, Fu Rui fell into endless mental internal friction, exposing the pathological psychology under the domination of the meritocratic society. As the plot of the novel progresses, Fu Rui attempts to break the bondage of the outside world, and tries to save Copernicus and Xiao Cai in an irrational way, and finally completes the subject alienation in the carnival. With salvation as the clue, Welcome to the World draws a secular picture of the world through the course of a doctor from rationality to madness, deeply explores the spiritual secrets dormant in people's hearts in contemporary society, and reflects the spiritual symptoms of The Times in irony.