Wolf Totem - Themes

Themes

Wolf Totem is narrated by protagonist Chen Zhen, a young man in his 20s who, like the author, left his native Beijing to work in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. Through descriptions of folk traditions, rituals, and life on the steppe, Wolf Totem compares the culture of the ethnic Mongolian nomads and the Han Chinese farmers in the area, praising the "freedom, independence, respect, unyielding before hardship, teamwork and competition" of the former and criticising the "Confucian-inspired culture" of the latter, which the author referred to as "sheeplike". The book condemns the agricultural collectivisation imposed on the nomads by the settlers, and the ecological disasters it caused, and ends with a 60-page "call to action" disconnected from the main thread of the novel.

The author states that he was inspired to begin writing Wolf Totem by an accident: he ignored the advice of the clan chief of the group of nomads with whom he was staying, and accidentally stumbled across a pack of wolves. Terrified, he watched as the wolves chased a herd of sheep off a cliff, then dragged their corpses into a cave. From then on, fascinated by the wolves, he began to study them and their relationship with the nomads more closely, and even attempted to domesticate one.