Two Landmarks Of The Rhetoric Art In A Dream Of Red Mansion

Xueqin Cao was a great litterateur and a great linguist as well. His masterpiece A Dream of Red Mansion, which reached the climax of Chinese classical novels, was unparalleled both in profundity and extensiveness. In the respect of rhetoric, he was adept at manipulating the Chinese characters with an unbelievably terrific skill. The book took him "ten years writing and revising". Chapters played an important role in this novel, which connected the different parts of the whole story together. Xueqin Cao attached high value to the explicit form of chapters, and paid special attention to the standard requirements for chiasmus format, the musical rhythm of the sound, and multi-rhetoric as well. He brought the use of chapters to the peak of Chinese classical novels. The image of 'flower' was used to arrange the characters' experiences in the main part, to develop the plot, and to create the context and atmosphere, which formed a huge and complicated metaphor net. The construction of this network was unprecedented. Lin Daiyu, the heroin of the book, was one of the most important figures in the story, to whom the author devoted his supreme ideal. She was the perfect combination of the 'flower' and 'people'. The use of chapters and comparing people with flower in A Dream of Red Mansion were two landmarks in the development of the rhetoric production of the Chinese novels. A Dream of Red Mansion, influences overwhelmingly the productions of innumerable writers afterwards. The novels by Henshui Zhang and Ailing Zhang are both influenced deeply by A Dream of Red Mansion, no matter from the perspective of their subjective narrations or the perspective of the objective evaluations from others.