The Good Earth
With every passing minute there are teenagers growing into adults who think they might want to get married someday. In a matter of time, some of these couples will then want to start a family of their own. These children will become their responsibility and there will be no way of knowing if they will accomplish their life dreams or if they will have to fight to keep their family together. In the novel, The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck tells a story of a farmer that fights to make a financially stable life for his family. In China, there are limited portions of land to be cultivated therefore, each farmer must be unconditionally devoted to his land if he wants to prosper. In retrospect, it is difficult for those that have been accustomed to the American domesticated society to relate to a culture that depends solely on self-produced resources. The resources a farmer grows on his private acre of land must be used not only to raise his family, but also to develop a promising future for the generations to come. Throughout all of the hard work and dedication that is put into the land, one must not waste the wealth on meaningless personal gain that could possibly demolish future goals. As demonstrated in the novel, a young farmer in late 1920’s rural China desires to surpass his poverty-stricken life for the benefit of his family until he realizes the true power of his wealth. As a result, the protagonist of The Good Earth reveres the acquisition of money until it proves to be destructive.
At the beginning of the novel, Wang Lung accepts his peasant lifestyle, but still yearns for financial stability and happiness. Initially, Wang Lung’s life consists of two priorities; he must aid his aging father and tend to ...
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...the land. “Out of the land we came and into it we must go, and if you will hold your land you can live, no one can rob you of your land”(Buck 357).
Works Cited
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. New York: Washington Square Press, 1931.
Conn, Peter. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. New York: Cambridge UP,
1996.
Doyle, Paul A. Pearl S. Buck. Ed. Kenneth E. Eble. Rev ed. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1980.
Hayford, Charles W. The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck. Ed. Elizabeth J. Lipscomb,
Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994.
“Pearl Buck.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon R. Gunton. Vols 7,11, and
18. Detroit: Gale, 1977,1979,1981.
Thompson, Dody W. American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize. Ed. Warren G.
French and Walter E. Kidd. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
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