The Ontological Storytelling concerning ‘Searching for Self-Identity’ in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, an autobiographical novel by a diaspora writer born in China and active in France, is a coming-of-age narrative that depicts the love of two adolescents. The novel is embedded in the historical context of the Cultural Revolution and intertwined with diverse political, social, and cultural circumstances. Consequently, most existing research has focused on issues related to the languages, cultures, and readerships of China and France, or on comparative analyses of the novel and its film adaptation. In contrast, this study interprets the novel as an ontological storytelling of the girl designated in the title as the “Little Seamstress,” reading her trajectory as one that moves from “searching for self-identity” toward “re-existing.” To this end, the analysis first relocates the girl—initially positioned as the Other by the narrator and by Luo—into the place of the subject. This shift aims to understand the Little Seamstress not as an “observed Other” filtered through the two young men’s gaze, but as an autonomous subject. To conduct this textual analysis, the study first examines, from the perspective of anthropos and the neo-humanitas, the process through which the girl actively reconstructs her own “knowledge and cognition.” It then investigates her departure from “passion and sexuality” and her independent pursuit of self-salvation as a transformation from gender-based identity to human identity. Finally, it describes the existential mode of relating between “self and other” that takes shape as she is reborn from an inauthentic to an authentic mode of being. This approach offers an ontological inquiry into the girl’s inner reflections and outward actions as expressions of a unique human existence. Thus, the significance of this study lies in its reading of the girl’s self-identity formation as an ontological storytelling, emphasizing the dissolution of the self and the discovery of the subject from a postcolonial, nomadological perspective.