The role of verse in Dream of Red Mansions: adding artistic flavor to the story, helping to portray characters, express social reality, and reflect on life and the universe.
1. Add artistic flavor to the story
This novel incorporates rich rhyme elements in the form of poems, songs, couplets, etc., making the whole story picturesque and gripping. Rhyme gives the story a unique beauty and poetic flavor, allowing readers to feel the poetic rhythm and beautiful imagery while reading.
The rhymes in the novel are integrated into the plots and dialogues of the characters, making the story more beautiful and pleasant, and the readers feel as if they are in a world full of poetry.
2. Helps to portray the characters
The characters in the novel express their emotions and thoughts through poetry, dialogue, singing, etc. The most typical one is the emotional entanglement between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu.
They often communicate by reciting poems and expressing their inner emotions through rhymes, which enhances the rich and colorful depiction of the characters. This artistic technique makes the characters more three-dimensional and vivid, allowing readers to have a deeper understanding of their inner world and feel their emotions.
3. Express social reality
The novel reflects various contradictions and problems in feudal society by describing the life of the Jia family and other aristocratic families. The rhyme serves as a tool of criticism, deeply analyzing and revealing feudal ethics, power struggles, class contradictions, etc. through satire and ridicule.
For example, in the novel, all kinds of absurd things that happened in the Jia family are satirized in the form of doggerel, which makes readers deeply touched by the hypocrisy and hypocrisy of feudal society. Therefore, rhymes play a role in examining social reality in this regard, allowing people to have a deeper understanding of feudal society.
4. Thoughts on life and the universe
The novel shows the author's thoughts on life and the universe through poems and couplets. These rhymes not only express the author's deep inner world, but also guide readers to think about the meaning and value of life.
For example, the ballad about flowers that appears in the novel expresses thoughts on the transience and impermanence of life through philosophical conception, making readers think deeply about life. This kind of thinking runs through the entire novel, making "A Dream of Red Mansions" transcend an ordinary novel and become a literary work with philosophical meaning.