The Good Earth

The Good Earth

I was in a complete daze after reading Pearl S. Buck’s remarkable novel, The Good Earth. It was somewhat hard not to stop what I was doing afterwards and try to put myself in the characters’ shoes and visualize everything that happened in the book. I was so taken by the plot that I remember not wanting to put down the book till I knew what happened next in one of the conflicts in the story. Considering my reaction to it when I first got the book and my reaction to it now, you would really think it’s ironic. First of all I wasn’t quite happy when I found out about the reading we had to do and obviously not looking forward to reading having to squeeze it in my hectic after school schedule. I remember when I was at the bookstore and saw how thick of a book it was I thought to myself, “Great...here’s another long boring book.” But after reading it I eventually proved myself wrong and found out it was well worth reading it all the way through the last page. Pearl S. Buck did an outstanding job on the book’s vivid description of the characters, emphasizing the importance of Wang Lung’s land, and its sense of dramatic reality.

The way the characters are described in the book you can really picture in your mind who they are. It’s very important to be able to visualize them because it helps you get to know them better as characters and have a better understanding of the book. One vivid description is O-lan’s, Wang Lung’s wife. “Wang Lung turned to the woman and looked at her for the first time. She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black color, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would.” (p.19) As I was reading this I got the impression that O-lan would be a faithful wife to Wang Lung and it turned out I was right. The fact that she wasn’t beautiful didn’t matter at all. She served her family well. Another meaningful description is Lotus’, Wang Lung’s first mistress, which has an irony to it if you compare it to O-lan’s.