Characters
Dream of the Red Chamber contains an extraordinarily large number of characters: nearly forty are considered major characters, and there are almost five hundred additional ones. The novel is also known for the complex portrait of its many female characters. The names of the maids and bondservants are given in the original pinyin pronunciations and in David Hawkes' translation.
Read more about this topic: Aunt Xue
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga—stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.”
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“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
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