Appreciation of Ba Jin's Cold Night

Theme: Cold Night is a literary work with profound thoughts and a tragic masterpiece of realism. The novel is different from Riptide and Resting Garden. It is not the collapse of a big family in the transformation of the times, but the destruction of a small family in social hardships. This paper describes the bitter story of how an intellectual family composed of free love broke down under the heavy pressure of reality, and reveals the fate of a kind and upright little civil servant, where you will go, the family broke up and others died. It exposed the dark reality of the Kuomintang-controlled areas in the late Anti-Japanese War, showed us the picture of the miserable life of the people in Chongqing, the center of Kuomintang rule, and breathed out resentment and injustice for the oppressed and insulted little people. ?

Characters: The outstanding feature of Cold Night is that it successfully created three tragic images with high typical significance:

The protagonists of the novel, Wang Wenxuan and Zeng Shusheng, are both modern intellectuals with university education. They share the common ideal of "saving the country through education", and they also weave many beautiful fantasies. This ordinary pursuit once gave them infinite hope, but under the pressure of social reality, their ideals were shattered and their youth disappeared, leaving only the sadness of life and the distortion of human nature. ?

Wang Wenxuan is an image of a weak intellectual who suffered from the burden of life and mental torture in the old society. He has a dual personality: on the one hand, the cold world, hard life and heavy work have twisted him into an extremely cowardly person, unable to cope with the heavy life and solve the contradiction between two women who love him.

Wang Wenxuan graduated from the Education Department of an education university in Shanghai. The outbreak of War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression shattered his ideal. In order to keep a job he didn't like and a little salary, he took a cautious and passive attitude towards Nuo Nuo. At home, I can't solve it between my mother-in-law and my daughter-in-law. His conservative and humble character became one of the reasons why his wife left, and finally he died of poverty and illness. The combination of cold social reality and family disputes has become an irresistible heavy pressure. On the other hand, as an intellectual, Wang Wenxuan still lost his kindness and integrity, was dissatisfied with the dark reality at that time, sympathized with people less fortunate than himself, loved his wife, mother and children, and often felt ashamed and blamed himself for not making them happy.

Love and hate, ideal and reality, reason and emotion, and life and death are intertwined, and they are trapped in Wang Wenxuan's heart, which makes him unable to extricate himself. Finally, he died alone on the day when he announced Japan's surrender and celebrated the victory of the Anti-Japanese War. ?