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transforms into a pile of clothing, she is full of remorse, wishing that he could have stayed and made up with her. This is a sad comment on the fate of Woman, and of women in general—she attempts to assert her independence, but in the end she finds that she still has to depend on Man, at least for his companionship.
    What follows are reminiscences of Woman’s tainted past. She spent a harrowing childhood in a windowless house. She tried to get her mother’s attention by cutting her finger with a pair of scissors. She was raped by her mother’s lover. She had an affair with a woman doctor and her husband, in which she was used as a plaything to spice up their sex life. And then there was her irksome one-night stand with some unknown man. According to her own admission, she has abandoned herself to living a life of sin after being manipulated and exploited by both men and women. Feeling guilty and remorseful, she takes off her ring, her bracelet and her earrings, all tokens of her past experiences, to purge herself of her sins, but all is in vain. As her disappointment grows, she feels increasingly depressed about herself, thinking that she is unfit to be a mother and unworthy of a warm and comfortable home. She is alone in the world among its evil and squalor, with nothing to look forward to except the end of her life.
    The latter part of the play features a series of hallucination scenes. Here Woman finds herself languishing in a state “between life and death” as she makes various frantic attempts to discover the meaning of her existence in her encounters with the supernatural. A masked man appears, chases her in his car and warns her of a bloody disaster. Then she slides down into the depths of icy water. A nun, whom Woman first mistakes as the Buddhist Bodhisattva, disembowels herself, cleanses her intestines, puts them on a plate and then throws them in Woman’s face. A man dressed in black and perched on high stilts approaches, watching over her with a big black eye in his hand. A headless woman follows Woman, also with a big eye in her hand. The play ends with Woman musing aloud on the question of her identity while an old man tries to catch an imaginary snowflake with his hat.
    As spectacle, the hallucination scenes in the last part of the play are the most dramatic and effective. The images are horrifying and dreamlike, and their accompanying earnestness and intensity make them disturbingly real. One recurring image in these scenes is the big eye, which appears twice and each time sends shudders down Woman’s heart. The first one, painted on a man’s hand, denotes the eye of other people and the opposite sex, and Woman feels that this eye has been following her all her life. The second is the eye carried by the headless woman, presumably embodying the soul of the heroine, and the eye is the inner eye. The fear of being spied upon lingers and terrorizes Woman as she feels that her judgement day is approaching.
    In The Other Shore , Gao Xingjian resorts to externalization to realize his idea of self-examination by using different characters to portray the divided self, the observer and the observed. In Between Life and Death , he goes one step further towards subjectivizing and neutralizing the self: the two versions of the self are combined and contained in one character. The narrating “I” is the experiencing “she,” even though the two are distinguished from each other in the use of deixis. The former, referring to her own story in the third person, distances herself not only from past experiences but also from the actions and emotions of the present. Ubiquitous in its presence, the “I” reveals itself only through narration, depending on discourse to prove her being (despite the fact that language is evasive and is itself in a state of chaos). The gap between the two selves remains unbridgeable from beginning to end. The narrating “I,” like the big black eyes in the play, is always observing