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The White Dog and Swing

Running head: The White Dog and Swing

White dog and swing
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White Dog and Swing is a novel by Chinese writer Mo Yan. This novel offers a useful prism for understanding the hybrid quality of Mo Tan's writing and particularly its relationship to what he sees as China’s canonical and heterodox literary traditions. White dog and the swing opens with a vivid description of the story’s middle-aged narrator returning to his hometown for the first time in a decade where he encounters the white dog of the title. The narrator explains that there was once a breed of large white dogs in Chinese area and that for many generations the dogs had been thoroughly interbred with the different specimen and no longer is any pure specimen left. The dog in this opening scene is distinguished as much by its black paws as by its white coat
In structuring White Dog and the Swing around a narrators alienated return to his hometown, MO Yan also stages his own virtual reencounter   with a collection of hometown stories by an early Lu Sun where he describes his return home after more than twenty years where he encounters a childhood friend in his novel "Hometown" and whites that their friendship would be restored. In Lu Xun's New Year's Sacrifice published three years later, the narrator also describes a trip back to his hometown where he encounters the woman servant he had met on an earlier visit. The woman abruptly asks the narrator whether the soul survives after death, whether there is a hell, and whether they will ever see their dead relatives again. The narrator is unable to answer the questions and hence feels humiliated, and later he is disconcerted the following day after learning that the next morning she had died.

Now, composed about sixty years later after the "Hometown," White Dog and the Swing revolves around an educated narrator returning to his hometown after some time. The story opens with a description of the dog leading the narrator, an educated intellectual who has returned to his hometown across a bridge. On the other side is the narrator's childhood friend who is herself repeatedly described using canine imagery. On noticing the bulge of his friend's breasts under her shirt, the narrator is reminded of children’s song in which a young woman’s breasts are compared to silver, and mother's breasts are described as being like a dog's teats. The narrator asks Nan(his friend)  how many children she has and is surprised to hear that she has three sons though she explains that she had triplets like a dog giving birth to pups.
The narrator later characterizes her disfigured appearance across between human and dog positioning her as a figurative extension of the white dog that helps reconnect her to the narrator in the first place. In this way, she becomes both an embodiment of the white dog itself as well as a symptom of the inevitable limits of the narrators own perspective.
The same White Dog that appears at the beginning of White Dog and Swing also provides a point of entry into yen’s 1986 story "Abandoned Child." The remainder of "Abandoned Child" revolves around the narrator’s discovery of a baby girl who was abandoned by her parents. The narrator finds the infant and feeds her and then goes to ask township chief for advice on what to do next. The manager insists that the narrator should raise the child since it was unlikely that anyone else would want her which left the narrator wondering whether there was no justice in the world.
It’s evident that from White Dog and swings Women in Chinese area are usually the most humiliated human beings and most neglected. They even being compared to dogs showing the low solace they are placed in the society. The women are also denied to speak up their minds, for instance, the narrator states clearly that her mother told her a dog couldn’t avoid eating shit which means women have no option but to do what they are entitled to.
References
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