Characters

Mo Yan's characters are not psychologically subtle in the manner of the European novel. They are figures from epic and folk tale — operatic, excessive, unforgettable. They do not have inner lives; they are their actions. Commander Yu kills without hesitation and loves without restraint. Dai Fenglian rules her distillery with the authority of a warlord. These are the characters produced by a violent century, and Mo Yan renders them with a dignity that classic social realism could not.

Commander Yu Zhan'ao

The grandfather. A bandit, a seducer, a resistance leader against the Japanese. He is brave and ruthless and impossible to judge. When a Japanese soldier tortures one of his men, he kills without hesitation. When he loves Dai Fenglian, he loves completely. He is the novel's anti-hero — the kind of man produced by a violent century, a man whose violence is indistinguishable from his vitality. The narrator, his grandson, looks back at him with admiration and unease: this is a man whose life was full in a way that modern life can never be.

Dai Fenglian (Grandma)

The matriarch. As a young woman, she is married off to a leper who owns a sorghum wine distillery — a transaction between families, not a marriage. When the leper dies soon after, she does not mourn. She takes over the distillery and runs it with iron discipline. Under her command, the workers are fed, the wine is excellent, and no one questions her authority. She is magnificent — one of the great female characters in Chinese literature, a figure who might have come from a Brecht play or a traditional opera. Her death, after a Japanese attack, is a set-piece of operatic intensity: Mo Yan slows time to a crawl, and we watch her consciousness dissolve into the sorghum field.

Father (Douguan)

The narrator's father, a child during the Japanese war who becomes a young man during the civil war. He is the link between the mythic grandparents and the disillusioned narrator — a bridge across the broken terrain of Chinese history. He witnessed the resistance, the land reform, the famine. He remembers what his son can only imagine. His life is quieter than his father's, but it carries the full weight of the century.

The Narrator

A contemporary man, the grandson of Commander Yu and Dai Fenglian. He is self-deprecating, funny, and nostalgic. He compares himself unfavorably to his warrior grandparents: they lived in a world of blood and fire and sorghum wine; he lives in a world of bureaucracy and consumer goods. He is the modern Chinese — disconnected from the earth, from tradition, from the bloody vitality of the ancestors. The novel is his attempt to recover something of what has been lost, to tell a story that can never be fully told because he was not there to witness it.

Uncle Arhat Liu

The distillery's master winemaker. He is captured by the Japanese, tortured, and flayed alive. His death is one of the most famous — and most excruciating — scenes in modern literature. Mo Yan makes the reader feel every second of it. But the suffering has meaning: Uncle Arhat Liu becomes a martyr, his death a rallying cry for the resistance. His body, broken and displayed, is transformed by the community into a symbol of defiance. This is Mo Yan's understanding of violence: it is not an end in itself. It is what happens to flesh when history bears down, and the question is not whether it happens but how it is remembered.