Wandering the Garden, Waking from a Dream

Abstract

Through a comparative analysis of Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lu Xun’s almost precisely contemporaneous collection Call to Arms, this essay considers the ways in which Yan Lianke’s novel uses motifs of death and “dreamwalking” to reflect on more abstract processes of representation and textual mediation. In particular, this essay argues that the trope of somnambulism in The Day the Sun Died is not merely an example of Yan’s mythorealist representational approach, it simultaneously offers a useful framework through which to understand mythorealism’s underlying representational logic.