The Story Archive

One Man's Bible

Gao Xingjian · 1999 CE · Novel · Chinese · Contemporary

In a Hong Kong hotel room with a German woman he has only just met, a Chinese exile is pushed into remembering what he did and failed to do during the Cultural Revolution: Red Guard, then denounced, then a cadre feeding his own manuscripts into a stove. The present is narrated as you and the past as he, because the man who did those things is not available to the first person. Gao finished it in Paris, a decade after leaving China and a year before the Nobel.

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Attributes

Genre
HistoricalPoliticalPsychological
Theme
Memory & TimeGuilt & ConscienceIsolation & AlienationFreedom vs FateWar & Violence
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
WandererThe DoubleEveryman
Plot structure
Nonlinear / FracturedConfessionDual World
Symbol / motif
The Book / ManuscriptFireThe Mask
Conflict
vs Societyvs Self
Mode / tone
RealistModernistIronic
Culture / tradition
Chinese

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