"A Dream of Red Mansions" is a wonderful book written with painstaking efforts by Cao Xueqin. This book takes the rise and fall of the Jia family as the main content, and uses the love tragedy of Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu as the main clue, showing a feudal world. The decay of the family and the cannibalistic nature of feudal ethics. As well as the profound themes about the choices in life, the struggle here and the demise of the other side, and the beauty of human nature from existence to disillusionment. It reveals an almost irreconcilable contradiction between ethics and human nature in feudal society, and reveals its inevitable demise. There are many characters involved in the book, many of which leave a deep impression on people. Among them, the male protagonist "The Demon King" is pure and kind-hearted, does not seek fame, yearns for nature, and is as gentle as jade. Jia Baoyu has a suspicious and stingy personality. Fragile, withdrawn, and elegant Lin Daiyu is honest and kind, but deep-minded, shrewd, good at handling complex interpersonal relationships, and good at social activities, but has utilitarian ideas and lacks true temperament. Xue Baochai, a noble lady in feudal society, is also vicious and hypocritical. , Wang Xifeng, who is fierce but capable of being a housekeeper, lively and cute, with a simple personality, Shi Xiangyun, who combines the willfulness of a boy and the gentleness of a girl, etc., have all become classic images in the history of literature.
This book also contains the breadth and depth of Chinese culture. There are many poems in it. Although these poems cannot be compared with Tang poetry, they are very rich in cultural heritage. Among them, Lin Daiyu's funeral poems, Xue Baochai's poems on xu, as well as the drinking orders, couplets, riddles and jokes are all worth pondering. The character's personality and value pursuits are vividly displayed.
The content and name of "A Dream of Red Mansions" are very consistent. Red symbolizes a group of beautiful and unlucky young women, the building symbolizes a feudal family, and the dream symbolizes emptiness, disillusionment, and the bubble of prosperity. Dream of Red Mansions shows a profound human tragedy, a tragedy of the times, and even a kind of pain caused by desire, and even reaches a nihilism in the end that color is emptiness and emptiness is color.
The emergence of the Dream of Red Mansions has a profound historical background, which is the development of the commodity economy at the end of feudal society, the decline of the feudal system and the intensification of social contradictions, the social reality of selfish desires and the dark and decadent officialdom system. The object of satire by the writer, "A Dream of Red Mansions" is such an anti-feudal novel.