Relationship Between Dreams and Reality - Essay Example

Zihao Zhang Shi Liang CHI 252 4/8 Dream and Life Every has an understanding of presenting s of real life and dreams. An basically will include other dream-like features such as like illusions and visions. In addition an author focuses on the relationship between dreams and waking up so as to make it interesting and lively. Dreams are representations of real life events because of their connection with ideas that were in a person’s mind before and the immediate past real experiences. Dreams lead one back into the realities of daily life. Dreams could also include things that people are yet to experience in real life but have had great passion and a warm interest in such things in their minds. The use of an integration of dreams and real life narratives in the story; Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream by Bai Xianyong is what mainly reveals the true significance and meaning of the story. The integration of dreams and real life narratives makes readers to know that Madame Ch’ieng wedded an elderly general but did not complete the bond. The reader is also able to know that Ch’ieng had an affair with the general’s aide-de-camp, resulting to a single romantic encounter that was the only sexual experience of her life. The heroine, Tu Li-niang, in a dream, experiences an amorous sexual encounter with a lover in a garden. However, the lover exists in real life and actually appears to her. The narrative tries to use dreams and real life experiences to bring about the welfare of women who have been denied access to basic human pleasures. I think the author is very imaginative in this novel. The events in the novel are not like I had expected and everything seems unpredictable just like what sometimes occurs in real life. However, if events can be determined then they can also be predicted. When events can easily be predicted, then the narrative will not be as interesting and readers will not find any pleasure in reading it. Authors struggle for reasons such as sense of suspense, creativity, and uniqueness. Unfortunately, the difference between fictional representation and real life is that the narration work itself is usually fixed once it is written; whereas in real life we are not aware of what actually comes next. Fiction and dreams tend to stick to at least some basic conventions, for purposes of formal continuity. Real Life on the other side is not truly the same as a novel or film because even when one dies, there are always others who continue living on unlike characters in novels who end with the author’s work. Each author is then required to be creative so as to resolve the challenge of summing up life while still using attempted as well as real literary methods. Bai Xianyong achieves this by creating a type of ironic narrative in that while destiny is hard to predict, it is highly elusive to usual Chinese literature and extremely modern. He achieves this by using an integration of dreams and real life narratives.He also employs the repetition of certain critical passages for dramatic effect. Madame Ch’ieng’s status of life as a bereaved widow who never had the pleasures of conjugal life based on both “fate” and as “life”.Mingyun’s(命运)ming(命)and shengmingde(生命)ming(命)are the same words in Chinese. Madame Ch’ieng embraces her Ming as it is her life in “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream”. When the reader removes the complications of illusions and networks of dreams and real life narratives in this text, one is left with an unavoidable truth: that of the prophecy fulfillment. The narrative development is made better by the changing back and forth between the room in which the celebration occurs and the issues of the past that the present dreams and images present for her in the psychological world. When the dreams from the experiences appear and disappear in her mind, a certain recurring rhythm is produced creating a sort of lyrical or musical impact on the reader; just the way a modern poem might create an emotion of rhythm and continuity in blank verse by the repetition of important phrases so that they stop to express meaning plainly and instead begin to work as formal devices in the poem. Bai Xianyong’s narrative improves by itself, working and reworking main events in her life, and returning to the fortune-teller’s observations and the important term yuannie which simply means “retribution”. The supposed evil action she did was to have a short-lived affair, but it is clear in the narrative as recognition of a fixed destiny; presumably started by the bone that the fortune-teller discovers. The rhythmic textual repetition also serves as the repetitive feature of Ming textually, as if it is simply the playing out in various or later from that which has already been determined earlier on. Ming as cultural reference acts as a way of sealing the narrative within the larger world of that which can be referred to as the fate of the Chinese nation, since China could be seen as the nation of fate or at least the country of Ming. It is one of the very important challenges with traditional China. It sees human actions as fixed and not contingent enough to enable a sense of individual agency. However, Bai Xianyong employs the references to this grand cultural narrative as a further method of ensuring his narrative will be clear within the cultural framework of China and not as something else; whether that is regional or novelistic. Bai Xianyong is terrified to death that his unavoidable existence on the political and geographical margins of China will disqualify him from being considered a member of the Chinese scholar. Madame Ch’ieng’s high marginal status as the woman who lives in southern Taiwan and maintains no communication with her former comrades and the exiled, is basically a constant reminder of the lost generation of Chinese scholars who fled Mainland China. While they are separated from the mainstream Chinese community and political life, the power of literature is such that by virtue of reference they are still able to keep, sustain and live their cultural identity. It takes place first and foremost through the use of literary insinuation and certain return of the repressed, through the rebirth of Ming in the memory of Madame Ch’ieng. Thus, this manner of making sense and accounting for the present situations by returning to a prediction of her fate achieved, ironically, a way of nurturing Madame Ch’ieng and the general intellectual project of Chinese in Taiwan back into the cultural fold of mainland China. In fact, since the story was done during the Cultural Revolution, one could rather safely make the argument that the true continuity in Chinese culture is through this line of development and not that of mainland China. Divination, then, works to reconnect the divided nation. In conclusion, authors use dreams and real life narratives in order to make the prediction of the story line difficult. The difficulty of predictions creates suspense and the drama necessary to make the narrative interesting. The use of duality of dreams and real life narratives in a story is key in contributing not only to the hidden meaning of a story but also a technique of making it more enticing and interesting as well. Works Cited Pai, Hsien-yung, and XianyongBai. Wandering in the garden, waking from a dream: tales of Taipei characters. No. 276. Indiana University Press, 1982. Read More