Diary of a madman
Diary of a madman ( Chinese 狂人日記 / 狂人日记 , Pinyin Kuángrén rìjì ) is a short story by the Chinese writer Lu Xun published at the beginning of the May Fourth Movement (1918) in China .
The mad protagonist's thought that people wanted to eat him up symbolically represents an exposure of the Confucian feudal ethics that existed at the time . The work was inspired by Gogol's short story Recordings of a Madman .
Introduction and structure
The short story can be divided into an introductory part, in which a first-person narrator describes how he learns that a friend of his has become ill with paranoia, and his brother receives two volumes of diaries that the friend kept himself during the illness have. The first-person narrator decides to “submit it to the medical world for study”.
Accordingly, the second part of the short story consists of thirteen chapters that the first-person narrator of the first part put together from his friend's diary. In the second part, the first-person narrative situation is also used, only that it refers to the madman.
Content and guiding principle
In an inner monologue, the madman in the second part of Lu Xun's short story develops the thought that people wanted to eat him up and looks for the reasons for it.
The way the madman describes his surroundings, can suggest that he at paranoia suffers: When he witnessed on the road, like a mother scolds her child, he gets scared and has the feeling that the mother would have meant him. When a doctor feels his pulse, he thinks that the doctor can only feel how fat he has already become in order to secure his share of his flesh. In the madman's perception, people's faces twist into blue grimaces with protruding teeth.
The madman suspects that the people around him wanted to eat him up because of their anger that he "trampled on Mr. Gu Jiu's bookkeeping." In the short story, this behavior is symbolic of the fact that he despised the feudal ethical tradition.
The climax is the following train of thought from the madman:
- I still remember my older brother teaching me to write essays. No matter how good the person was, if you said something against him, then my brother drew a large red circle for "right" underneath. If you forgive a bad person, he considered it inadequate, too different from the general idea.
- […] And decided to look up my history textbook. However, the story did not contain any dates, only the words "ren yi dao de" (note: catchwords of Confucianism ) are above each page. I just couldn't sleep. And then I noticed the words between the lines:
-
The whole book contained only the two words "people eat!"
- (滿 本 都 写着 “吃 人” 两个字！ Mǎnběn dōu xiězhe "chīrén" liǎngge zì! )
The key words of Confucianism in the history book blur before the eyes of the madman into the two words "people eat" (吃 人, chīrén). “Eating” (吃, chī) is intended to mean “incorporating other living beings for the sake of one's own benefit”.
This is a symbolic allusion to the social conditions at the time after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty , in which, despite the republican revolution of 1911, there was still no social shift and the peasants continued to be oppressed by the feudal lords and ultimately by the ruling class were mistreated. The image of a man-eating government may be reminiscent of Hobbes' Leviathan , the model of a state that lets its citizens completely delegate power and which has been criticized for legitimizing tyranny.
With his charge
- Just because it has always been so, does it have to be right?
and the exclamation
- You have to change immediately, walk from the bottom of your heart. You must learn that the future has no place for cannibals.
the protagonist figuratively expresses a very progressive attitude that shook the intellectuals on the eve of the May Fourth Movement .
The protagonist himself comes from a family of large landowners, but ultimately turns in his fictitious delusion against feudalism and humanism and democracy. This suggests the intent of the author Lu Xun. He wants to question the role of individual people in society and their class affiliation, and hopes to shake them awake through the appeal in the short story.
Further guiding principles and conclusion
The author Lu Xun also criticizes the dullness of the popular crowd by describing the people surrounding the protagonist. The protagonist meets a man whom he speaks openly about the problem of "cannibalism". The uninvolved and evasive reaction of the person addressed may seem provocative in view of the desperation of the madman about the social grievances for the reader, who has started to cheer for the protagonist.
It is not the actual plot of the story that is intended to captivate the reader. Rather, the literature of the May Fourth Movement goes hand in hand with a focus on the internal psychological conflicts of the main characters. The structure of the action manifests itself in the emotional state of the protagonist: The initial grief
- [...] it makes me sad.
turns into anger
- I will start with him when I curse man-eating people!
mistrust
- He smiled and nodded to me, but his smile was insincere
nostalgia
- What a relief it would be if anyone could banish this obsession from their minds
Despair
- After four thousand years of cannibalism, how can a person like me ever hope to meet real people?
until the story finally ends with a desperate cry of hope:
- Perhaps there are children who have not yet eaten human flesh. Save, save the children ...
After the reception of the end of the second part, the reader also finds the cheerful atmosphere in the first part ironic, in which the first-person narrator of the first part has learned that the sick person has already recovered and has gone to the district town there an office awaits him there.
The character's commitment to progressive thinking and humanism therefore only lasted as long as she was mad. Then it fits back into the old structures of domination and society, which expresses the author's sarcasm .
literature
- Wang Jingshan (ed.). Lu xun mingzuo jianshang cidian. Beijing: China Heping Publishing House, 1991.
- Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer. History of Chinese Literature. Bern, Munich, Vienna: Scherz, 1990.