Gorgeous, Bright, and Legendary: On Zhao Dahe’s Long Historical Novel The Burning Castle

In the newly published long historical novel The Burning Castle, Henan novelist Zhao Dahe wrote the outstanding epic of the anti-Japanese war heroes of the Tengchong people in a beautiful, bright, and legendary artistic form, expressing the author’s strong national and patriotic sentiments, and spreading his extraordinary artistic imagination and literary creativity. While achieving these artistic achievements, the following aspects should also be given sufficient attention: the overly dominant narrative perspective, self deletion of narrative structure, the legend and coincidence in story telling making the character images blurred and thin, the atmosphere of the story simple and light, and the historical writing distorted and rough.