Summary Of Saboteur By Ha Jin

Ha Jin’s short story “Saboteur” is about a newly married man Chiu Maguang and his unjustified arrest. It ends with Chiu trying to take revenge on the police by trying to infect them with acute hepatitis, but he infects many citizens of the city. The setting of the story is a city in China after Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the setting plays a key reason for the events that unfold throughout the story. When Marxist critic, Milkhail Bakhtin ideas are applied to “Saboteur”, the idea that the story is dialogic will become logical to the reader. The reader has to understand that when Marxist ideas are discussed in literature, it has a different meaning to what ideas are represented when Marxism is discussed with politics or economics. Marxist

At the beginning of the story, Jin tells the reader that there is a statue of Chairman Mao that had peasant napping at the feet (Jin 1). On the next page the protagonist was bought up the idea that the National Party was to make all citizens equal (Jin 2). These two ideas are opposites of each other; the last idea stated that all citizens were equal but just on the page before Jin has peasants, which are people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Just the idea of having peasants voice that the idea of equality is not true, but the peasants were sleeping at the feet of a statue of Mao. With this statue the reader can see that there are people at the top of the social hierarchy; if there is a social hierarchy there cannot be equality within the society because people will have to be more privileged or lesser privileged than others within the

The protagonist, Chiu, also looks towards Mao as a god-like figure as he quotes Mao to comfort himself, like a religious person would quote their religious leader, prophet, savoir, or supreme being in times of desperation (Jin 5). They look towards Mao or the government that he represents as the saving force in society that will bring peace and order, but in “Saboteur” the government is the cause of the chaos. Just like the police are the ones who are task with keeping order in this society, but they are the ones who causes violate the law. As the reader can see in the first few pages, the police pour tea on the protagonist and then arrest him for causes a disturbances (Jin 1). Chiu and his bride are stunned that their object of worship is the force that is creating what they are meant to stop (Jin 2). A dialogic approach can be used here to show commentary of the Chinese government and its citizens. At one angle the reader can see that the citizens look towards the government for comfort, as Chiu does with quoting Mao (Jin 5). The government instead creates an environment that grows chaos (Jin 2). The story comments of the government can be used to see how the author feels about the Communist