Review of, The True Story of Ah Q

In the story “The True Story of Ah Q”, Lu Xun wrote nine episodic chapters describing a series of adventures of Ah Q. Ah Q represented a combination of the weaknesses of the Chinese people. Using Ah Q, Lu Xun wanted to analyze certain particular “Chinese characteristics” such as gaining merely “psychological victories” through arrogance, belittling, the strong bullying the weak, foolishness, escaping from reality, and despising females, in order to deliver his message that would to reveal the “diseased” social system in China at that time. Lu Xun was dissatisfied about the current characteristics of people and the society and so he wrote this story to awaken the consciousness of his fellow countrymen and change their minds. The purpose of my essay is to demonstrate how Lu Xun and the narrator in “The True Story of Ah Q” created a list of “Chinese characteristics” and related these to the subject of awakening China and thus influencing the history and scholars of his time.

The narrator played an important role throughout the entire story. The narrator appears to be a modern Chinese intellectual relaying the life story of Ah Q. Sometimes the narrator is talking about Ah Q, while at others he is telling us what is happening. At still other times, he would go directly into Ah Q’s mind and tell us what Ah Q is thinking. Lu Xun successfully uses the role of the narrator and Ah Q to create a narrative of Chinese characteristics in several ways as summarized below.

First, the narrator often reveals Ah Q’s inner thoughts and thus exposes his negative characteristics. In the chapter titled “Barred from the revolution”, there are internal descriptions of Ah Q’s thoughts when he wanted to become a revolutionary but the Imitation Foreign Devil would not let him. Before wanting to be a revolutionary, Ah Q found himself being “ignored” by people. Therefore he was to get “into touch with the revolutionary party” and “talk things over with the Imitation Foreign Devil” (103).