Rulin waishi

The Scholars is a satirical novel that describes the life activities of various Chinese Confucian scholars, mostly under the early Jiajing period of the Ming dynasty. Many of them are portrayed as hypocritical individuals, however. Some of them are overly obsessed by the fame and glory of civil service to the point of losing all sanity and became mentally unstable. Some of them are theoretically dogmatic, rigidly follow the old ways and denied all flexibility and innovation. Some of them are hypocrites, spending days talking about morality and ethics but actually live a despicable and useless life. Some of them are corrupted by fame and glory, they are eager to sacrifice friends, relatives and family for more fame and more glory. Via these scholars, Wu Jingzi indirectly criticized the civil service examination and education system under the Qing dynasty. The author could not directly attack the ruling Qing dynasty which could lead to capital punishment, therefore he chose to portray his story in the previous Ming period, which was depicted as increasingly dogmatic and meaningless. The novel further criticized the backward feudal "moral codes" which confined people in an ideological prison.

Wu Jingzi did create several "good" characters as model for an ideal Confucian scholar; they cannot be corrupted by fame or money and they despise the contemporary civil service under Chinese feudal government. One of them, the scholar Du, bears strong similarity to the author: descended from a well-to-do family, spent all of the family assets and later became poverty-stricken, hated the civil officials, expressed progressive ideas and was strongly critical of the popular Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism dogma. Via the character Du, Wu Jingzi portrayed women sympathetically as Du treated his wife kindly and equally in the time when women were considered inferior to men.

Chinese commentators have traditionally seen The Scholars as having a loose structure. The famous author Lu Xun wrote that "the novel has no central linking element" and is more like "a group of short stories". Hu Shih echoed this view, writing that the novel "lacks a general structural basis". The same opinion has been put forth by Western scholars. James R. Hightower described the work as "amorphous and plotless".

However, more recent scholarship by Zbigniew Slupski detects organization in The Scholars on three levels. The first is the anecdotal level, in which the work can be divided into various "units" centered around a comical fact or occurrence. The second level is that of biography, in which the author constructs a multifaceted view of main characters in the work. An example is the portrayal of Zhou Jin, the elderly examination candidate. The final level is that of autobiography, the author's attitude toward the events of the story. This is revealed in chapter titles, poems, and occasional narrative interludes.[2]

Chapter 37 of the novel depicts in great detail a Confucian ceremony honoring a Confucian sage of antiquity, Wu Taibo. Both modern and Qing dynasty commentators have noted that this chapter constitutes the "high point" and "structural apex" of the novel. Shang Wei believes that the chapter points to Wu Jingzi's simultaneous desire to follow Confucian ritual and his need to critique it.[3]