Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber
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Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber By Liu Zaifu

Chapter :  Section 1 (Written Between 1995 AND 2004)
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In the era of Hamlet humankind knew its mother but did not know how to deal with her, which gave rise to the perpetual delays and hesitations on the part of the prince of Denmark. In the era of Dream of the Red Chamber humankind knew its mother, and it further realized that its mother was one more shackle and killer for humankind. The power of the mother created tragedies soaked with the children’s blood and tears.

22.

Cao Xueqin’s Jia Baoyu, Goethe’s Werther, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby are all characters full of humaneness and they are all great romantics at heart. Faust comes from Goethe’s head (intellect), whereas the young Werther comes from Goethe’s life. Jia Baoyu and Gatsby also come from life. Consequently, they are full of life. Napoleon liked the young Werther and carried a copy of The Sorrows of Werther when he went to the battlefields. This tells us that the hero of the French nation was also truly sincere and romantic at heart.

23.

The youthful love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu is heavenly love. On the surface, it is the mutual attraction between two human beings living on earth. At a deeper level, it turns out to be the poetic, everlasting companionship between two stars in the sky. Before being born into the human world, the two lovers had enacted a story of their first love in which Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting watered Crimson Pearl Flower with sweet dew. After they came to the human world, they enacted a heartbreaking tragedy of paying the debt of tears. Far from being a myth, their heavenly love is the love between two souls entangled in life. Subconsciously, both Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu harbor a kind of nostalgia, a yearning for the first love they still remember. When they met for the first time, one of them felt that the other looked familiar while the other felt that they had seen each other before. Here, their memory was at work. When they fall in love for the second time, their love is just a continuation of the love they had in heaven.