The Good Earth Point of View :: Good Earth Essays

The healthy Earth Point of View     The Good Earth is a third-person narrative, provided the horizontal surface it tells is Wang Lungs. Everything that happens is described as he experiences it and as it have-to doe withs him. The narrator explains Wang Lungs thoughts and feelings but almost never those of other characters. You perceive them through their words and actions.   This is obviously a rather limiting way of telling a story. In staying strictly within Wang Lungs experience, the narrator cant be all-knowing. You might think that the novel could have been written in the firstly person, with Wang Lung as the I. But this hero is an uneducated, indeed an illiterate farmer, and if the story were told in his words the novel would be limited not only to his experiences but to his vocabulary. In using the third-person form the narrator has somewhat more scope.   even the scope is quite limited. For example, when O-lan brings a bowl of tea to her husband on the first morning of their marriage, you know that she is afraid of him only because he sees the solicitude in her expression. Later you see that O-lan comes to trust her husband from the way that she goes astir(predicate) her work, taking her full share of the toil as an equal partner, and as well as from the way she offers advice to Wang Lung on the rare occasions when a crisis moves her to break her popular silence.   Just as the characters are described only as they affect Wang Lung, every event is told only as it relates to him. Drought, flood, locusts--all are part of the story only as they affect Wang Lung. Wars are fought all over chinaware and robber bands plunder and murder in the villages, but we learn of these dread events only as Wang Lung does. His uncle turns out to be a member of a notorious band of brigands. He learns that a robber band raided the reside of Hwang during the famine. His cousin brings a band of soldiers into his house. He learns that his third son has begin a high official in the revolution.