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:
“Of the other characters in the book there is, likewise, little to say. The most endearing one is obviously the old Captain Maksim Maksimich, stolid, gruff, naively poetical, matter-of- fact, simple-hearted, and completely neurotic.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)