I am not sure if such discussion should be located here or in the academia forums. So if anyone feels this should belong in another forum, feel free to do so.

I am not sure if people here are familiar with non-western literature classics. As a person who grew up reading the Chinese classics such as romance of the three kingdom, journey to the west and Water Margin, I use to regard them as great stories when I was younger.

However, looking back at them, and using the standards of western literature, I am not sure if the famous Chinese novels can even be regarded as a good piece of literature.



One of the biggest issue I have is Journey to the west. It is a story about the monkey god, or Sun Wukong, wrecking havoc in heaven before being tamed as a student of Buddhism. The story have no three act structure, one of the most basic fundamental to good story telling, with no climax in the novel.

Chapter 13-99 is not much better than an episode of power rangers, as it mostly consist of the monkey god killing a monster of the day.

There is no actual character development beyond Sun Wukong being tamed, nor does the novel provide ample reasons to show why there is a change in personality for the monkey.


The Water Margin does not even feel like a coherent novel at all in my opinion. It tells a story of how a bunch of former commanders and civil servants ended up as a bunch a mountain bandits, all resisting the corruption of the government.

However, because it chooses to tell the background story of every almost every single bandit chapter by chapter, it becomes easy for the reader to lose track of the overall story arc. It feels more like a biography about the characters rather than a proper narrative.


As for Romance of the Three kingdom, I do find the tale to be much better to Journey to the West. It is a pretty tragic tale, with fairly well developed characters. It tells the story of how three sworn brothers and their attempt to restore the Han dynasty.

The plot feels similar to George RR Martin's game of thrones, with multiple character from different kingdoms and houses all desiring to conquer all under heaven.

Of all the four great novels, this is the best among them.


For people who have read any of the four great Chinese classical novel, what is your opinion on any of them? Is any of the novels comparable to some of the great works in English literature?

 

You suck! How dare you steal my childhood nostalgia.

Actually, while you may have a point, they aren't to be taken that seriously from the standpoint of modern literary analysis. Plenty of historical stories (The Illiad, Gulliver's Travels, e.g.) don't fit the canonical, Aristotlian, three-act structure with full rigor. However, as foundations for cultural literacy, you accept them for what they are and move on.

 

Does a story like Journey to the West influence the literacy style of chinese storytelling?

No major Chinese novel really follows the structure of that particular novel. Even if we compare the Illiad or any Shakespeare play to Journey to the west, it is still able to outshine the Chinese novels from a technical point of view.

I've always felt that most traditional Chinese stories suffer in comparison to most English literature mainly because they did not develop a proper structure for good story telling.

The overwhelming majority of modern Chinese literature is mostly influence by western literature structure rather than traditional Chinese structure.

 

You're forgetting that Journey to the West is a collection of folklore and myth, which are definitely episodic in nature.

Just because they happen to be bound into one collection and continuity doesn't mean they were ever meant to be a full-blown flowing novel.