《聊斋》中《野狗》篇读后感

弹钢琴

"The strange tale" is a literary genre popular in ancient China's Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern dynasties. It records mysterious happenings that defy belief but are reputed to have really occurred, be they edifying, religious, supernatural, occult, or simply downright horrific beyond all reason. On rough reading, people may find this short narrative a typical nothing-out-of-the-ordinary "strange tale", but a discerning reader who knows well how literature works will definitely remark a sense of dark satire permeating, within and without, these dozens of lines masterfully composed by Pu Songling. This wordsmith of China's Qing dynasty managed to transport his modern readers back to the time of "the rebellion led by Yu Qi, [when] men died in countless numbers, mown down like fields of hemp." This fifteen-year-long historical event crammed in the text's very first line helps set not only the scene but the tone for the peasant Li Hualong's harrowing encounter with the "wild dog", a creature with a human's body and an animal's head that seems to have been roaming the hills at night, foraging for the skulls of corpses. It was at this barbarous time of innocent people being indiscriminately massacred by government troops that the brains-sucking monster materialized. Thus, this macabre piece can be interpreted as Pu's veiled criticism of those long-forgotten war-time atrocities and also his implicit lamentation for the people living in that dark period of Chinese history.