Plot
The protagonist Yang Guo is the orphaned son of the first novel's antagonist Yang Kang. He is raised briefly by the couple Guo Jing and Huang Rong he is sent to the Quanzhen Sect for better guidance in moral values and orthodox martial arts. In Quanzhen, Yang Guo is often picked on and bullied by his fellow students and his master Zhao Zhijing is biased against him. Yang Guo flees and ventures unknowingly into the nearby Tomb of the Living Dead, where the Ancient Tomb Sect is housed. He is saved by Xiaolongnü, a mysterious maiden of unknown origin, and becomes her apprentice. They live together in the tomb for many years until Yang Guo grows up. After being attacked by Li Mochou, they leave the tomb and stay on the mountain. Xiaolongnü develops romantic feelings for Yang Guo and after a while, he too falls in love with her.
However, their romance is forbidden by doctrines of the Confucianist society of that time. Throughout the story, their love meets with several tests, such as the misunderstandings that threaten to tear them apart and the encounter with Gongsun Zhi. Finally, after their reunion and marriage, Xiaolongnü leaves Yang Guo again, owing to her belief she cannot recover from a fatal poison, and promises to meet him again sixteen years later. While Yang Guo is wandering the jianghu alone, he meets several formidable martial artists and a giant condor. His adventures gradually mould him into a courageous pugilist, whose prowess matches the Greats of his age. Yang Guo serves his nation by helping the Han Chinese of Song defeat the Mongol invaders. At the end of the novel, he is reunited with Xiaolongnü and they are recognised as heroes of their time.
Read more about this topic: The Return Of The Condor Heroes
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)