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The Good Earth

Pearl Buck is very careful not to estrange her audience from the human struggles of the novel’s characters while using their distinctly different culture to globalize the human condition. The Good Earth is full of imagery and customs that the Western reader is unfamiliar with, but none of these distract the reader from the story of a man trying to provide for his family and work the land. Wang Lung goes from poverty to wealth, but he is changed by the wealth. Where as at the beginning of the novel he was an obedient and simple character that was easy to empathize with, by the end he has been corrupted by wealth and women. Lotus Flower brings him to the point where “he went without a word and had it [his hair braid] cut off, although neither by laughter or scorn had anyone been able to persuade him to it before” (196). By highlighting some of these cultural differences in the novel, Buck also seems to be drawing an eye to the similar customs we may have in our own culture. While women may enjoy more freedoms in the West, she still sees a problem with the roles that women are expected to play that has not been fully resolved.
The agrarian myth that we discussed in class also provides a connection between East and West. The theme of the struggling farmer is empathized with in nearly every corner of the world, and even thousands of years ago, the events of this book could have been clearly understood. The myth provides a moral compass for the novel while also distilling the story, which in another writers hands could have easily become an epic with washed over stereotyped characters, into a narrower and more satisfying personal story. Although the reader learns many things about China, the novel is not about these things. Instead, the agrarian myth combined with the social upheaval work to make the unfamiliar familiar.
It is in this key way that Pearl Buck’s Good Earth differs from Endo’s Silence. Endo tries very hard to educate the reader on...

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