Literature Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 3

Literature - Essay Example Yu Hua has drawn inspiration for his novel from an American folk song about an elderly slave â€Å"who experienced a life’s worth of hardships, including the passing of his entire family—yet he still looked upon the world with eyes of kindness, offering not the slightest complaint†. (Hua, P.249) At the end of the novel, Xu Fugui is left alone, with his only companion being an ox that he names after himself. He uses the mutual identity between man and beast as a metaphor for the human condition. The novel begins and ends the story through the mechanism of a double narration: one a young student collecting songs and folk stories from the peasants in the countryside and the other, old Fugui and his ox telling their story to the student. Zhang Yimou, a noted Chinese film director, has gained notoriety among his own people due to his recurring acts of exposing a dark side of his country to the outside world. But he persists with his mission in the same manner through the film adaptation of To Live. He attempts to convey several profound messages through this movie, in an attempt to prod the viewers’ conscience to awareness of injustice in the Chinese society. Though in this context, the novel as well as its film adaptation serves the same purpose there are several charact eristics that distinguishes one from the other. The film and the novel are significantly different even though Yu Hua participated in writing the screenplay. Each medium offers different possibilities and at the same time suffers from different limitations too and these are reflected in the differences between the novel and the film. The novel has Fugui telling his story in installments, chronologically, with returns to the narrative present. This aspect is attributed to the novel’s being first published in serial form in a literary journal. The film has no second narrator to whom Fugui will