The Good Earth Point of View :: Good Earth Essays

The Good Earth Point of status     The Good Earth is a third-per password narrative, but the recital it tells is Wang Lungs. Everything that happens is described as he experiences it and as it affects him. The narrator explains Wang Lungs thoughts and feelings but almost never those of separate characters. You understand them through their words and actions.   This is obviously a rather check carriage of telling a story. In staying strictly within Wang Lungs experience, the narrator cant be all-knowing. You might think that the novel could have been written in the first person, with Wang Lung as the I. But this hero is an uneducated, indeed an illiterate farmer, and if the story were told in his words the novel would be limited not nevertheless to his experiences but to his vocabulary. In using the third-person form the narrator has somewhat to a greater extent scope.   Yet the scope is quite limited. For example, when O-lan brings a bowl of tea to her hus wad on the first morning of their marriage, you know that she is afraid of him only because he sees the fear in her expression. Later you see that O-lan comes to trust her husband from the way that she goes about her work, taking her full share of the toil as an qualified factorner, and also from the way she offers advice to Wang Lung on the rare occasions when a crisis moves her to see her customary silence.   Just as the characters are described only as they affect Wang Lung, every event is told only as it relates to him. Drought, flood, locusts--all are part of the story only as they affect Wang Lung. Wars are fought all all over China and robber bands plunder and murder in the villages, but we escort of these dire events only as Wang Lung does. His uncle turns out to be a component of a notorious band of brigands. He learns that a robber band raided the House of Hwang during the famine. His cousin brings a band of soldiers into his house. He learns that his third son has become a high official in the revolution.