Characters
Dream of the Red Chamber contains an extraordinarily large number of characters: nearly forty are considered major characters, and there are almost five hundred additional ones. The novel is also known for the complex portrait of its many female characters. The names of the maids and bondservants are given in the original pinyin pronunciations and in David Hawkes' translation.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. Thats what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my lifethe first twenty years of ithad about them something semi-fictitious.”
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“No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has....”
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