earticle

영어

“Shangliu Ertong” refers to the children from Taiwan's wealthiest families, serving as a proper noun to describe these individuals. These children are raised with a level of education and protection that distinctly sets them apart from those in typical families. Parents from the upper class are intensely focused on their children's education, creating a climate of excessive competition that has become a significant societal issue. In “Shangliu Ertong,” each character embodies a distorted zeal for education, fueled by desires for recognition, material wealth, success, and fame within a fiercely competitive environment. Through their interactions, the characters' traits become more defined. This study analyzes the characters in “Shangliu Ertong” using the triadic theory and Greimas's actantial model. The triadic theory is employed to identify the core traits of the characters and their influence on one another, effectively illustrating the relationships of cooperation, betrayal, solidarity, and indifference among them. Three independent forces?hetero, homo, and neutro?interact to highlight each character's unique features. Notably, the protagonist, Chen Yunxian, initially displays a homo inclination by resisting change and accepting reality. However, she later transforms into a strong hetero character, desiring change, before ultimately reverting to a homo inclination by the end. The neutro character plays a positive catalytic role in this transformation, emphasizing the interaction of hetero, homo, and neutro forces that accentuate character traits. This highlights a critical message about the abnormal zeal for education among Taiwan's upper class. Additionally, Greimas's actantial model is applied to provide a detailed examination of the interactions among characters, using the six elements of ‘Sender,’ ‘Object,’ ‘Receiver,’ ‘Helper,’ ‘Subject,’ and ‘Opponent.’ This model facilitates an exploration of the complex and subtle conflicts between characters, such as those between the Chen Yunxian family and the Liang Chaji family. The analysis reveals that through cycles of cooperation, conflict, and betrayal, the excessive educational fervor of Taiwan's upper class becomes increasingly apparent.