Mo Yan - The Old Gun (1188-1198)
Background
Critics described the work of Yan and as “Roots Seeking”. This was a literary movement in the 1980s, “one of many waves of response in China to the collective experience of swift modernization in the preceding decades. The optimistic narratives of revolutionary progress that buoyed the nation…” (1188).
The story “... portrays a younger generation trying to reconnect with its ancestors. Near rated in the third person, the story revolves around a boy and his relation to his dead father through the troop of the “ old gun”.” (1188)
“His desire to perform a difficult and symbolic charged act, namely firing a gun, represents compensation for wrongs done to him in the past, but it also represents the larger desire for control, vitality, and power. “(1188)
“The language creates an almost mythical world of wild ducks, flooding waters, weaving sorghum stocks, kaleidoscopic Colors as the sun slants across the landscape – and untamed natural world, for feeding, hunting, and killing. “(1189)
Story
The author takes great pains to describe the area that the boys in. He uses vivid descriptions of nature. (1190)
“Now, though, There was no rust – he had sandpapered it all away. The gun lay their twisted like a hibernating snake; at any moment, he felt, it might wake up, fly into the air and start thrashing the sorghum stocks with it steel tail. “ (1191)
Excitement of the boy preparing his gun, is described as an itching, sweating, nervousness with his heart pounding. (1191)
He’s there near the sandbar for duckhunting presumably.
“It’s time, he thought, I should open fire, but he didn’t do it. As he ran his hand over the trigger he suddenly realized his great disadvantage, recalling with a sense of pain his index finger: two of the joints were missing, the last one alone remained, a neural tree stump squatting between his thumb and his middle finger. “ (1192)
When he was six years old his mother told him how his father had died, he was shot by the very gone he holds now. Which is a family heirloom handed down by his grandmother.
“Though he appeared and tent on his books, he was always aware of the spirit of the gun; he even seem to hear it clicking. He felt like you do when you see a snake – wanting to look but scared at the same time. “ (1193). -is the snake something of nature to be respected? Or is it something ominous and dangerous that should be feared? He admits to his mother that he wants to kill and not study. His mother chopped off his index finger so that he could never use the gun to kill anything. She did not want anything else to be killed by the thing that killed her husband.
He can’t seem to remember last time he ate meat, this may be why he wants to kill one of the ducks. To cook and eat. (1194)
His father’s mother had killed her husband with the gun. And his father tried to kill himself with the gun. (1196)
“He toppled slowly to the ground, trying with all his strength to open his eyes. He seemed to see the ducks floating down around him like rocks, falling into his body, piling up into A great mound, pressing down on him so that it became difficult to breathe. “ (1198) he died?
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