Mo Yan criticizes social and political movements for their oppression and persecution of human life. His narratives describe animality to break down the anthropocentric barriers between human and animals. “The multi-dimensional representation of human animality has been the distinctive feature of Mo Yan’s literary practice of exploring humanity.” The animal allegory in this novel is based on a literary imagination of Buddhist samsara: a complete cycle starting from a human’s rebirth as an animal and ending with an animal’s rebirth as a human. This process not only expresses human’s existential wish to forget hatred, but also constructs an ecological holism of the harmony among humans, animals, and nature. In this way, ecological criticism intersects with political and cultural criticism.
