Analysis of the hero image in Camel Xiangzi and its related stories.

(1) Simple, kind and upright Xiangzi

At first, Xiangzi was simple, kind and upright, with a struggling personality and a beautiful spiritual world. Xiangzi is an ordinary coachman with a distinct personality. He has many excellent qualities of working people. He is kind, simple and loves labor. He is a farmer who went to town to make a living after the rural bankruptcy. Because of this, "he almost did everything he could eat with strength." But he finally chose to pull the cart. After pulling the rented rickshaw, he decided to buy a rickshaw to pull it himself and become an independent worker. He is young and strong, hardworking and willing to use all his strength to achieve this goal. In his view, pulling your own cart can "not regenerate the driver's anger, and you don't have to perfunctory others." He believes that with her body and strength, Dora can run fast and save money, and she will certainly achieve her goal in a few years. Strong desire for survival and tenacious spirit of struggle constitute an important aspect of Xiangzi's character. While portraying Xiangzi's hard-working and strong character in the novel, the author also tries to reveal his beautiful spiritual world from a broader life content. He is serious and responsible, paying attention to credit and loyalty. He had an accident pulling a rickshaw and was badly hurt, but his first thought was Mr. Cao in the rickshaw. Mr. Cao felt guilty when he fell, and offered to use his salary to compensate for the loss. He thought Mr Cao was a good man, so when Mr Cao was driven away by the spy, he suffered the pain of being robbed, and he was bent on how to live up to others' entrustment and take good care of Cao Zhai. The works also show Xiangzi's compassionate side. When he saw the old horses and ponies that were more difficult than himself, they lost their heads in hunger on a cold night, he did not hesitate to buy them mutton buns. He also tried his best to give sympathy and help to the unfortunate joy tortured by life. All these show Xiangzi's beautiful mind as a laborer.

Secondly, Xiangzi's character contains the requirements of resistance and independence. Xiangzi usually seems to tolerate all grievances, but his rebellious demands are also reflected in his character. For example, he resigned in Yang Zhai's anger; Revenge on Si Liu, the owner of the car factory, can illustrate this point. He has always been strong and independent, which shows that he is uneasy about his humble social status. He didn't want to listen to Gao Ma's words, usured, coveted 60 cars in Si Liu, and didn't listen to Tigress's words to do small business, all of which showed that he had an idea of demanding independence.

(2) Xiangzi's selfishness, degeneration and destruction.

Xiangzi, as an ordinary urban self-employed, has left many distinct marks in all aspects of his personality and even his image, whether he is strong, diligent, simple or narrow-minded, conservative and cautious, that is, he has a strong earthy atmosphere in appearance, living habits, mental state and spiritual temperament, showing his characteristics from the countryside.

Typical rural habits and farmers' consciousness. He is different from the general coachman, and he has no experience in entering the garage, or because he maintains the hard and honest mentality and temperament developed in the countryside. He is different from Gao Ma, who is full of calculation skills. Although he is a domestic helper and a self-employed urban worker in Cao Fu, their manners and behaviors are in sharp contrast with their inner activities anywhere. Therefore, Camel Xiangzi is actually a tragedy in which a simple and honest rural youth degenerates into a city hooligan. In him, the pursuit of being an individual worker and the pure and beautiful peasant character are lost at the same time, which is an important feature of Xiangzi's artistic model and an important clue of this tragedy.

Xiangzi, who used to be as tough as a camel from the outside to the inside, always had an unspeakable loneliness and powerlessness in his heart. He can do nothing about almost anything. When he felt distressed and afraid because he was cornered, what made him sad even more was that his grievances had nowhere to tell. This can't be explained only by the fact that he is an individual worker. They are bound by a scattered and narrow mode of production and lifestyle. It is true that they are narrow-minded and short-sighted. They are selfish and indifferent because they are self-sufficient, but as workers, they are kind and helpful, especially to their own similar workers and unfortunate people. The crux of the problem is not that on the one hand, Xiangzi has completely left the countryside and is unwilling to have anything to do with it, on the other hand, he has not taken root in urban life, and he doesn't even know how to establish proper contact with the new living environment and seek the care and help of others. Only in this way will he feel so lonely, helpless, at a loss, particularly vulnerable and unable to withstand blows and setbacks.

The biggest feature of Xiangzi's personality is the subjective cause of this tragedy. It is his strong desire and urgent requirement to change his social status and life destiny through personal struggle. Since he is heavily oppressed by the whole society, it is naturally difficult for him to succeed in his isolated and scattered personal struggle. Even if he has his own car and keeps it, how can he get rid of the depression and really become an independent and happy worker? This unrealistic plan made him blind from the beginning, and all sincere efforts were beyond doubt. Only failure and tragedy await him. The writer's description of Xiangzi's character did not stop there, but also made a detailed excavation at a deeper level. He wrote that Xiangzi constantly had reflections and doubts about his efforts, so after he lost his car for the first time, he tried to save money by pulling it, but he kept thinking about it. When he remembered it, he felt so jammed in his heart that he couldn't help thinking, what about getting stronger? Even if another one comes soon, how do you know it won't happen again? It can be seen that he had a premonition of the bleak future and asked himself a rhetorical question, but the immediate answer was still "even if you buy it today, you have to buy it tomorrow." This is his wish, hope, even religion. He didn't pull his own car, he lived in vain. His best hope is to buy a car. If you have to buy a car, you can't let yourself down. If you forget this, he will forget himself. He felt that he was just a running animal, and there was no improvement and no human sentiment. "The conclusion is that no matter how much it costs," there is a car that can handle everything ". As individual workers, they only feel their own value and meaning in life in this pursuit. In Xiangzi's place, the car has been integrated into his life, although he has long compared his efforts to "straying into luoquan Hutong, going around and returning to the original place." "But he still ran like this, first full of hope. Here, sobriety and confusion, sobriety and blindness are almost the same thing, and it is meaningless to distinguish them. If Xiangzi had been content with his fate from the beginning without praying, none of this would have happened, at least it would not have made people feel so sympathetic and sigh? The internal relationship between Xiangzi's character and tragedy is very clear in these descriptions. After working hard for three years, the car was quickly taken away by the mutinous soldiers, and the money he had accumulated was blackmailed by the spy before he could buy it. Although he lost his car and money, he still didn't lose hope of buying another car, but Tigress died in childbirth, leaving him with the last car. This series of blows is undoubtedly very heavy for Xiangzi, who regards cars as his life. The oppression of society and the gloom of the world made Xiangzi feel the hardship of being a man and the bleak future. He finally pinned his hopes on the combination with Joy. Unfortunately, Joy, whom he sympathized with and loved, committed suicide again under the destruction of the dark forces, leaving him with no last hope. An individual worker who wanted to eat by himself was thus eaten by the old society. Xiangzi finally embarked on the road of depravity under the attack of irresistible dark forces. Xiangzi's failure is not only manifested in economic poverty and material losses, but also in spiritual destruction. In the process of shaping Xiangzi's image, the writer highlighted the amazing changes in his inner world. The old society destroyed his ideal of life and made him a completely different person. Before, he set himself a clear goal in life and struggled with hope, but when all this went up in smoke, he no longer had any desire for life. Finally, Xiangzi became a man who did everything, eating, drinking, gambling and even fighting. It turns out that the "independent, pure, strong and hardworking Xiangzi" has almost become a "one who only eats sweet potato skin and whiskers." As Lao She wrote at the end of the first edition of the novel: "Decent, strong, dreamy, self-interested, personal, strong and great Xiangzi, I don't know how many funerals he sent with others, and I don't know when and where he will be buried, burying the last ghost of degeneration, selfishness, misfortune, being born in the womb of social pathology and individualism!" This is a painful criticism of Xiangzi, as well as a complaint of grief and indignation against the evil old society. It can be seen that the image of Xiangzi is typical to some extent, which effectively summarizes the life trajectory of urban individual workers. They struggled desperately to survive, but in the end they failed. Such a personality tragedy not only aroused the readers' introspection at that time, but today, such a small-scale production consciousness still remains in people's minds, hindering the development and progress of themselves and the whole society, and the description can still make people excited, thought-provoking and deeply inspired.