“文化大革命”作为特殊的政治时期在令我国的政治、经济、文化以及社会形势受到难以估量的重创的同时，在历史上产生了一个绝无仅有的知青群体，同时也孕育出具有鲜明时代特征的一批知青作家和知青文学。这些在中国当代文学史上占有重要地位的传统知青文学逐渐形成了一个特定模式，以其文本的真实性和理想主义倾向吸引读者，但存在着主题僵化，结构程式化的诸多弊病。八十年代末期从美国接受西方美学思潮的王小波重新审视知青生活，运用理性与戏谑交融的话语模式、复调式的叙事结构、作品人物对真实环境的主动消解等创作手法，试图挖掘潜藏于“文革”这一特殊场景所暴露出的人性根源，对比传统知青文学作品有着不少超越之处。

As a special political time in the history of People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has left behind it destructive impacts on politics, economy, culture and social stability. In the meanwhile, it gave birth to a generation which is the only of its kind known as “the intellectual youth”, from which a group of writers have sprouted. The works of those writers are of prominent historic features, thus they were categorized as “literature of the intellectual youth”. The literature had gradually formed a mode of its own. At the rear of the 80s of the last century, equipped with western aesthetics eyesight, Wang Xiaobo decided to survey the life of the intellectual youth from a different perspective. He employed Foucault’s theory of power and sexuality, as well as the idea of polyphonic novel by Bakhtin, and attempted to dig out the human nature uncovered by the Cultural Revolution. Compared to the works of other intellectual youth writers, he had gone beyond.