What kind of book is Wukong Biography?

It's a novel written today. Many people especially like those sentences in it. Almost every sentence is classic.

This is a story about the tragic heroes the Monkey King and Tang Priest fighting against their fate. The author reinterprets some plots of The Journey to the West from the perspective of modern people, and the whole story is full of thoughts. An alternative journey to the west, an alternative fantasy classic.

The story does not follow the single narrative mode in The Journey to the West, but is narrated by three lines: the love between Zhu Bajie and Ayue, the warm but repressed feelings between the Monkey King and Xia Zi, and the sad affection between Tang Priest and Xiao Bailong. The story is constantly changing among Zhu Bajie, the Monkey King and Tang Priest. Each story seems to be independent, but it is spliced together into a complete story. This postmodern narrative mode, which disrupts narrative events and logical order, and allows stories to travel freely between the past and the present, the world and heaven, is like a montage in a movie, constantly changing the lens and showing the typical characteristics of postmodernism.

Theme of the work

In today's Biography of Wukong, the image that once represented justice and acted as a typical and plastic surgery hero has undergone a thorough transformation. Every image is endowed with rich and complex value connotation, which transcends the one-way and specificity of the image in The Journey to the West. Every image itself is full of contradictions, actions and puzzles. They have surpassed our original image interpretation framework and norms, and constantly impacted and revised our existing horizon of expectation. If we use the binary standard of good and evil to divide the characters in Wukong's stories, it will often appear stretched and pale. In this sense, the anti-typology strategy of the characters in Wukong's stories has greatly increased our understanding of the paradox, richness and diversity of the internal conflict between living conditions, life values and individual personality.

In the stories of Buddhist scriptures in The Journey to the West, many hardships encountered by Tang Priest and his disciples were caused by the negligence or poor supervision of immortals and Buddhists. Due to the negligence and poor supervision of the immortals, their mounts or subordinates descended to the world, but the final result was that they were raised by the immortals without any punishment and were taken to heaven to return to their original lives. The harm to the world is just a game to adjust the boring life in heaven. As their masters, they don't have to bear any responsibility. On the contrary, it is the Monkey King who should thank the person who initiated the recitation. Just because they are gods. What they do is right and authoritative, and other cows have to obey. Wukong in Wukong's story is against God. His birth determines that he is not a god. He is not a god, but a creature. He thinks that God and everything are equal, but God thinks that they are superior and wants everything under his management. But Wukong wants to change all this and confront God. Although he is scarred every time, he enjoys it. Wukong in Wukong's story is a metaphor in a sense. It represents the questioning of the legitimacy of this sacred and self-evident center and hierarchy, and represents the struggle against authority and the efforts to dissolve the center.

The immortals in Wukong's stories are all denied by the author. They are portrayed as obscene, selfish and afraid of death. The jade emperor is weak and incompetent, the queen mother is overbearing, and the Tathagata is self-centered and the faces of the gods who protect their lives are exposed, which makes it difficult for people to pay tribute to these gods. In the book, the Queen Mother is portrayed as a neurotic woman suffering from hysteria. Her power is supreme, and all the rules and regulations in heaven are her will. Not only is she a powerful fairy, but even the jade emperor, who is completely dominant in classical works, is here. She dare not go against any of her wishes in public.

Love description

Love shines brightly in Wukong's story, and the characters in the novel get more comprehensive and secular performance in love. The moral sage of Journey to the West did not talk about love, but became an eternal love. Some people even say that the main line of Wukong is love. Among them, Xiao Bailong's love for Tang Priest, Xia Zi's love for Wukong and Pig's love for Ayue are unforgettable. Love has become the only sacred thing, replacing the sacred position of going to the Western Heaven for Buddhist scriptures. This sacred love is not only a reasonable imagination and recreation of The Journey to the West, but also an inevitable reality of the author's novel concept. Love illuminates Wukong's story and adds a touching touch to the novel.

In The Story of Wukong, the author gives more human feelings to his master and disciples and describes the love of four lovers. Yao, the Monkey King, Xiaobailong and Tang Priest, Ayue and Pig Bajie, Baihua Shark and Kuimulang. Love is the normal instinctive demand of human beings, the pursuit of love is the legitimate desire of human beings, and the loyal and pure love between the two sexes is beautiful. It is more obvious to fight against the environment that hinders and suppresses them in order to pursue the freedom of love. [3]

Artistic feature

Unlike Journey to the West, Wukong's story does not pursue the completeness of form and the linearity of plot development. In Wukong's story, the whole story is actually told at two different time and space levels. The story 500 years ago and the story 500 years later are told again. The story is basically realized in the collage and flashback of time and space. In the process of telling the story, the author turns to "antecedent" from time to time, bringing readers' attention to 500 years ago and telling the story of past lives. Not only the narrative time can be extended, accelerated and reversed at will, but also the narrative space can be transformed, collaged and repeated at will.

At the beginning of the story, Tang Yan's body was burned to the ground, and Pig Bajie laughed and burst into tears. The story turns to "antecedents" and begins to tell the past lives of Zhu Bajie-Tian Peng, Yuan Shuai and A Yue. Then Bajie dreamed that he was pulled back to the real life 500 years later. Then, the author explains the story of the Monkey King and Xia Zixian's daughter, the story of Xiaobailong and Tang Priest with the narrative mode of "pre-love". Through this explanation, the background 500 years ago is gradually clear in the eyes of readers. Why were Bajie and Friar Sand demoted to heaven, how did the master and apprentice learn from the scriptures, and how did the Dragon Maid in the East China Sea become the mount of Tang Priest? The author explained slowly.

The story is divided into two layers, but there is a causal connection. The whole story structure is a circular structure, and the ending of the story only causes the story to happen, which becomes the product of time spatialization, that is, the story becomes a combination that can interact, penetrate and juxtapose at two time and space levels.

In the finale, A Yao found a stone in the barren grave and buried it in a mountain with burnt flowers and fruits, which is exactly the beginning of the story of learning from the scriptures. The whole story is like a ring, with no beginning and no end. Even if it begins with the ending, the ending is also the beginning of the story, which shows the absurdity of postmodern western time and space to the fullest.

Dialogue art

Wukong's stories are basically composed of dialogues, which is rare in novels. According to common sense, there is only dialogue, and the novel is fragmented and fragmented, but the biography of Wukong does not feel this way. This is mainly because our reading of The Story of Wukong is carried out under the background of The Journey to the West, which we are very familiar with. Some plots need not be introduced, but this omission and directness have become a highlight of this work. Due to the deep accumulation of The Journey to the West's bottom text, in China's literary tradition, the language expression of his text and the language characteristics of the characters have formed a fixed understanding mode in readers' minds. Now, in a sense, the writing of Wukong Biography is to dispel readers' understanding of the fixed meaning of a specific language in The Journey to the West through parody of language, so as to get rid of the shackles of history and express themselves.

Character language is an important channel and way to construct character images. In a sense, the construction of many characters in The Journey to the West, such as Tang Priest, the Monkey King, Pig Bajie and Friar Sand, is accomplished through their language expressions in various occasions, plots and events. Now, I also realized this in the biography of Wukong. He subverted our understanding of these traditional images, first of all, at the language level through parody. In the Journey to the West, they should have spoken like this, but now in the story of Wukong, their language is distorted and allowed to speak in another way that we have never or can't accept, so as to achieve our subversion and deconstruction of their image. In the first chapter of Wukong's story, Tang Priest was caught by a tree demon. According to our original understanding, Tang Priest should be fearless, magnanimous and fearless, but when the tree demon allowed him to say his last words, what we didn't expect was that he cut down the word "help" loudly. While making people laugh, the Tang Priest's language deconstructs the sacredness of Tang Priest's image, and makes people see Tang Priest's side of pursuing advantages and avoiding disadvantages and fearing death as a secular human nature. Through the Tang Priest's call for help, the pseudo-sublimity made in The Journey to the West was completely dispelled. As for Zhu Bajie, this paper turns him into parody through humorous language to express his secular utility. Bajie said in the article: "When my mother gave birth to me, she didn't tell me what the meaning of a pig's life was. I'm still thinking hard. I didn't know what is really stupid until all the other brothers took all the nipples first. " This kind of language is a parody of modern spoken language, showing the hooligan taste of Zhu Bajie. Parody is humorous in language expression and effect. The purpose of mixing funny and parody elements in discourse is to subvert the original characters.

The proposition of the work contains rich philosophy. The story of Wukong comes from the name of the Monkey King, one of the protagonists. If the cultural concept of "three religions in one, understanding the mystery of heaven and earth by discovering the root of one's own life" is the basic idea of The Journey to the West's author to absorb the cultural trend of thought at that time and create a mythical world, then Wukong's story contains the explanatory spirit of China's traditional thought, which is influenced by nihilism and game spirit in the western trend of thought and expresses the spiritual confusion and confusion of modern people. At the end of the work, you can see the sentence "When the light of 500 years is just a scam, why are the characters in space-time sad?". Why are you happy? Such philosophical discourse corresponds to the theme of Wukong and is thought-provoking.

In addition to sublimating the theme, philosophical discourse plays a supreme role in the development of the plot. At the end of Chapter 11, the Monkey King is prepared to seek justice because he was not invited to attend the Flat Peach Conference. Xia Zi sighed: "The glory of the sunset glow won't last long. After the glory, it will be a long darkness.". This was originally a very common description of the natural landscape. Put it here, but it laid the groundwork for the unfortunate ending later. As a turning point of the story, this description is naturally implicit and has infinite charm.