Wu Cheng ‘En – The Journey to the West

I really enjoyed stepping out of my reading comfort zone and delving into The Journey to the West. The grandiose, mythical story telling mixed with beautiful poetic narratives makes for a very interesting and unique read. But while the story contains a lot of mythical/fictional elements, such as having a stone monkey as the protagonist, I like how the story is seemingly very deeply rooted in Chinese culture. It’s also very interesting how the poetic narratives through out the chapter help explain situations in beautiful detail. I think they help create an atmosphere in a fresh and more detailed way then typical prose of the story. The way the story unfolds it seems impossible to summarize certain scenes or present the beautiful imagery without using poetic narration. I really enjoyed the character of The Stone Monkey and can already see parallels between him and Candide. There’s an underlying optimism about Stone Monkey which, much like Candide, is only outdone by his blind faith in everyone and everything. From being the first one to jump into the waterfall in order to become king, to blindly following the woodcutters path and calling him an immortal, the monkey is clearly somewhat naive like our friend Candide.