Diary of a Madman

Required to read short stories (If they have been full novels, I don’t think I would have finished the course last semester), the Diary of a Madman is one of those. At the literal level, it is about a man suffering from a delusion–people are going to eat him; even the dogs connive. Who could describe a personality disorder better than the author Lu Xun who is a medical doctor himself? It is interesting to note from the readings of others that the intent of the short story is to ridicule traditional China morphing the Confucian ways as a cannibalism that is eating a weak society. For all people including his own family who are into that system already established, the diarist is seen as deranged to be against it. Reading this interpretation before coming to the ending, I agree that getting well and obtaining a job is a lost cause–a devouring up by a society of cannibals to become one of them but then hope is expressed in the last page of the diary. It reminds me how others have written in disguised themes during a revolution to further a cause.