A Madman's Diary

"Diary of a madman " (Chinese狂人日记/狂人日记, Pinyin Kuángrén Riji ) is a beginning of the movement of the fourth of May (1918 ) in China published short story by Chinese writer Lu Xun.

The idea of the mad protagonists, people wanted to eat him, symbolically represents an unmasking of the then existing Confucian Feudalethik dar.

Introduction and structure

The short story can be divided into an introductory section, in which a narrator describes how he learns that a friend is suffering from it on paranoia, and two of his brother volumes of diaries gets handed over, which led to the friend while the disease itself have. The narrator decides to " submit to the medical world to study " them.

Accordingly, the second part of the short story of thirteen chapters, which has put together from the diary of his friend, the narrator of the first part. In the second part of the first-person narrative situation is also used, only that this madman is referenced.

Content and main idea

The madman in the second part of Lu Xun's short story develops in an inner monologue the idea that people wanted to eat him up and examined them for their reasons.

The way in which the madman describes his surroundings, can suggest that he suffers from paranoia: When he witnessed on the street, like a mother scolds her child, he gets scared and has the feeling that the mother would have meant him. As a doctor he feels the pulse, he thinks to himself, the doctor just feel how fat he has become already, in order to secure his share of his flesh. In the perception of the madman, the faces of the people to distort blue gargoyles with protruding teeth.

The madman believed that the intention of the surrounding people to want to eat him up, out of their anger at the result that he was " the accounts of Mr. Gu Jiu has trampled ". This behavior is in the short story symbolic of the fact that he had despised the feudal ethical tradition.

The highlight is the following reasoning of the Insane:

The buzzwords of Confucianism in the history book as a blur of crazy to the two words " people eat " (吃 人, Chi řén ). " Food " (吃chi ) is understood to mean " incorporation of other creatures to the own advantage ."

This is a symbolic allusion to the social conditions at the time after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, when it was still not taken place despite the Republican Revolution of 1911 to societal shifts and the farmers continued to be oppressed by the feudal lords and ultimately the ruling class and were abused. The image of a man-eating authorities may recall Hobbes ' Leviathan, the model of a state that the power can be fully transferred by the citizens, and was criticized on the order, post it constitutes a justification for tyranny

With his indictment

And the exclamation

Expresses the protagonist in the figurative sense of a very progressive attitude on the eve of the May Fourth movement of highly shook the intellectuals.

The protagonist himself comes from a family of landowners, but turns in his fictional delusion ultimately against feudalism and the humanism and democracy. This allows us to draw conclusions about the intent of the author Lu Xun. He wants to put the role of the individual in society and their social class in question, and hopes to be able to shake them by calling in the short story.

More guiding principles and final

The author Lu Xun also criticized the apathy of the masses by the description of the protagonist surrounding people. The protagonist meets with a man he openly on the problem of " cannibalism " responds. The uninvolved and evasive response of the addressee like this in the face of despair, the madman on the social situation upon the reader, who has started mitzufiebern with the protagonist, a provocative effect.

Not the actual plot of the story is to captivate the reader. Rather, the literature of the May Fourth movement is accompanied by a concentration on the inner psychological conflicts of the main characters. The plot structure is manifested in the emotional state of the protagonist: The initial mourning

Goes into a rage

':' I 'm going to start with him when I curse the man-eating people!

Distrust

Longing

Despair

Until the story finally ends with a desperate cry of hope:

After the reception of the conclusion of the second part to the reader turns the cheerful atmosphere in the first part as an ironic, in which the narrator of the first, part has learned that the sick person is already well again and I have gone to the county seat, as there waiting for him to office.

The use of the fictional character for progressive thinking and humanism thus lasted only as long as it was in his madness. She then adds back in the old government and society structures, which manifests itself the sarcasm of the progressive author.