Little John -- A Fairy Tale That Touches Lives and Moves Souls: A Fairy Tale That Touches Lives and Moves Souls

Author: Wang Ai Tan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: A fairy tale novel that literary giant Lu Xun carried with him throughout his life. For profound wisdom, simplicity and purity are often deep, because the worldly tricks that adults believe they are smart about, when viewed on a broader and longer scale, are actually meaningless. For the wise, all people are children. Little John depicts a dreamy child who constantly seeks love, gaining and losing, losing and gaining, in this process. In his dreams, he accompanies flower spirits and engages in various conversations with various creatures in the forest. The conversations between these strange beings cover a vast range of knowledge, with boundless richness in simplicity and a profound sense of life's weight and sorrow in purity. Little John uses numerous fairy tale figures, such as the flower spirit Whirligig, the pedantic scholar Mr. Puzzler, the little imp Know-All, the little dog Presto, the Number Doctor, Death, and others, to portray the profound opposition between humans and nature, as well as the resulting sense of crisis and tragic emotions. The novel observes and penetrates the forest filled with opposition between humans and other creatures, the vast and dark city, and the fear and inevitability of death through the eyes of a child, revealing a profound intellectual process. This part of the text is exquisite and vividly imaginative, but behind it lies the soliloquy of a lonely thinker in the forest. Little John had a significant influence on Lu Xun's thoughts and creations. Around the mid-1920s, Lu Xun seemed to temporarily put aside his rhetorical weapons, changing his sharp and unrestrained writing style. He often returned to his childhood home, seeking ghosts, the (), beautiful snakes, crickets, wild flowers, and other creatures in the Hundred-Grass Garden. These writings were later collected in Evening Chrysanthemums.