Abstract: Tablet biographies collected in Literary Selections such as inscriptions, epitaphs and resumes are different from prose ones. While the former is composed in parallel styles, upholding the beauty of rhetoric such as antithesis, diction, sound and allusion, and giving a brief summary of biographers’ merits and achievements, the latter describes their speeches and deeds strictly according to the facts. This difference can easily be seen by comparing the tablet biographies of Cai Yong, Ren Fang and Shen Yue collected in Literary Selections with the same authors’ prose biographies collected in History of the Later Han Dynasty and History of the South Qi Dynasty. And the understanding of the narrative mode of the parallel prose can help understand the selecting criteria of Literary Selections.

Key words: narrative mode of the parallel prose, beauty of rhetoric, tablet biography