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Key Points for Analyzing the Character Trang in 'The Wife Hunter'
Sample Essay: Key Points for Analyzing the Character Trang in 'The Wife Hunter'
Assignment
Character Trang in Kim Lân's 'The Wife Hunter'
1. Background, Appearance:
- Trang is a destitute young man, a transient resident, working as a hired ox-cart driver to support his elderly mother. Being a transient resident means coming from elsewhere. Consequently, transient residents have no fields, which were paramount for peasants in the past. Moreover, they face discrimination, often relegated to the outskirts of the village or remote areas. His 'house', if it can be called that, always stands desolate amid a tangled garden overrun with wild grass. Furthermore, as a transient resident, Trang is looked down upon, with hardly anyone bothering to converse with him, except for the children who mock him upon his return from work.
- Trang has an unattractive, rough appearance. Every evening, he awkwardly walks along the narrow alleyway that cuts through the market of the transient residents into the wharf. He chuckles to himself, his small eyes squinting in the evening shadow, his broad jaw jutting out, trembling, giving his coarse face a perpetually mischievous and fierce expression... Trang's head is shaved smooth, his broad back resembling that of a bear, even his smile is odd, always needing to tilt his head back to chuckle.
2. Personality:
- Trang is carefree, simple-minded.
+ Trang is almost oblivious to his circumstances, lacking self-awareness. He enjoys playing with children and is not much different from them. Every time Trang returns from work, the children in the neighborhood see his large, lumbering figure descending the market and rush out to surround him, laughing and cheering. Then they, some pulling from the front, some from the back, some clinging, some pulling his legs, refusing to let go. At that moment, Trang just tilts his head back and laughs heartily. He considers himself and the children as brothers, friends, and that neighborhood of transient residents buzzes a little more each evening.
+ Even the significant matter of getting married, Trang decided in a snap. It was while he was pushing the rice cart up the hill, Trang shouted a playful remark to ease the fatigue. His main concern was having fun. Then, a hungry woman begged for a piece of cake, and Trang happily agreed. The second time she came begging, Trang readily took her home to become... his wife! Truly, no one has ever decided to get married as quickly as Trang!
- Trang is a generous and open-minded man.
+ Actually, initially Trang wasn't intending to find a wife. Seeing the hungry woman, he gave her food. When she decided to follow him, Trang happily accepted. Trang married primarily out of compassion for someone less fortunate than himself.
+ When the woman agreed to be his wife, Trang became conscious of taking care of her: That day he took her to the provincial market, spent money to buy her a small basket for odds and ends and treated her to a hearty meal at the food stall... He even bought two quarts of oil to light up their dim home for his new bride.
+ Marrying not for love, but 'picking up a wife' easily, yet Trang doesn't look down on his wife. He wants to make her happy (showing off by buying oil for lighting), sometimes wanting intimacy but not daring to be too forward. Trang cherishes, nurtures the happiness he has found: While Trang seems to forget all the hardships and darkness of daily life, forgets even the dreadful hunger threatening, forgets the days before him. In his heart now, there is only affection between him and the woman by his side. Something new, strange, never seen in that wretched man, it envelops Trang's entire being, as if a gentle hand is caressing his back.
- After getting married, Trang becomes a responsible person.
+ He's obedient to his mother, avoids arousing others' resentment. Especially for Trang, having a wife is stepping into a different life: The next morning, when the sun rises like a sickle, Trang just gets up. His body feels light as if he's walking out of a dream.
+ From a sluggish cart driver, only concerned with the present and living carefreely, Trang has become someone interested in social issues and yearning for a better life. When the tax collector's drum outside the village hurriedly beats, Trang's face turns pensive, which is rare for him. In his mind, scenes of poor hungry people rushing on the dike Sop to steal Japanese rice come up, and in front is a big red flag. Trang remembers that scene with remorse, regret, and still sees the hungry crowd and the fluttering flag in his mind... Trang opened the story of 'The Bride Gatherer' with hesitant steps on the winding path through the market of the homeless in the twilight of the evening, and he also ended that story in the early morning with a new image of the hungry crowd rising under the red flag fluttering.
3. Destiny:
- Trang's life epitomizes the fate of the poor before the August Revolution. Before the famine, poverty was so severe that he couldn't get married (similar to Hạc's son in Nam Cao's work of the same name who couldn't get married due to poverty, leading him to become a gravedigger). During the famine, he got married, where happiness intertwined with misery.
- Lives like Trang's, without a revolutionary societal change, would remain in darkness and hunger indefinitely. For Trang, although such a change hadn't occurred yet, life had begun to offer him a direction. It's the path toward revolution naturally and inevitably that people like Trang would take, and in historical reality, Vietnamese farmers did embark on this path.
4. The Writer's Character Construction Art:
