“I copied out the chapter where Ursule somnambulates. I longed to be like her: to be able, while I lay asleep on my bed, to see what my mother was doing in our apartment five hundred kilometres away, to watch my parents having supper, to observe their gestures, the dishes on the table, the colour of the crockery, to sniff the aroma of their food, to hear their conversation… Better still, like Ursule, I would visit, in my dreams, places I had never set eyes on before…” (58-59).
“‘This fellow Balzac is a wizard,’ he went on. “He touched the head if this mountain girl with an invisible finger, and she was transformed, carried away in a dream. It took a while for her to come down to earth. She ended up putting your wretched coat… She said having Balzac’s words next to her skin made her feel good, and also more intelligent’ (62).
Balzac uses the symbols of the sheepskin coat to demonstrate how important Balzac’s novel was to the narrator because it represents many things to him. It represents the narrator’s longing to leave re-education and go back home to his family; It represents rebellion against the government that put him in re-education and banned this book; It represents how as Luo and the narrator continue through their re-education, they might look the same but on the inside, but they are completely different than they were when they first began re-education, just like the sheepskin coat.
I think that the coat represents how impacted the narrator is by the books and how he is willing to go through the trouble of writing it on his coat to remember it. I also believe that because the sheepskin coat was a gift from the peasants, it's ironic that inside of it contains the words from books that were supposed to be destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say that it demonstrates how important Balzac is to the Narrator. He is so attached to it because he has been exposed to a completely new world and way of living, something other than Communism.
ReplyDeleteBesides the significance of the banned words, I think it's interesting how you compared the inside-out aspect to the mindsets of Luo and the narrator.
ReplyDeleteI feel like you guys chose really good quotes and I like the analysis that something may look different on the outside than the inside. Just like the friendship between Luo and the narrator.
ReplyDeleteGreat title:)
ReplyDeleteI like your analysis, and how there is internal change going on within the characters.
ReplyDeleteI like your title; it draws the reader in and it matched your analysis really well.
ReplyDeleteI like how your title summarizes what the thesis, and the analysis was about. Also I like the quotes you used to demonstrate the significance of this item.
ReplyDelete