《The Good Earth》读后感精选10篇
《The Good Earth》是一本由Pearl S. Buck著作，Washington Square Press出版的Paperback图书，本书定价：US$14，页数：368，文章吧小编精心整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
《The Good Earth》读后感(一)：Comparison Between Red Sorghum and The Good Earth
From either Red Sorghum or The Good Earth, I can get a simple impression of the traditional Chinese local culture. The two novels have many similarities. For example, both the two stories set up in a turbulent epoch, and they say praise of famers’ wisdom and struggle.
However, the two novels differ from each other in some aspects. Next, I will emphasize the difference to clarity my opinions.
In Red Sorghum, the story happens in the Northeast Gaomi Township during the anti-Japanese war. The author uses the first- person narration to tell us a story about three generations of the Shandong family. The author doesn’t employ the time order and time intersperses, creating a strange and novel feeling. The words employed in the novel are colloquial, unrestrained and it seems that the characters and the beautiful scenery float before my eyes. Red sorghum is the most important symbol here and it runs through the whole novel, which expresses the narrator’s love for the land and reflects vitality, struggle, and high spirit of Chinese people.
As for main characters, I take Dai Fenglian(the narrator’s grandmother) for an example. Dai Fenglian is not a typical China woman. She is wise, independent, rebellious, full of wild and lust. When she knows his husband is a leper, she is unwilling to marry him and she has been looking for her own happiness. Facing the evil Japanese, she keeps calm and assists villagers to fight against the enemy. From Dai Fenglian, I think the theme of the novel is that on the one hand, people should be positive, and they have the right to pursue their independence and happiness. On the other hand, a nation must be strong and powerful, and people should understand the significance of patriotism.
The Good Earth sets up in the 1900s. At that time, China was in turmoil, and traditional Chinese culture was in conflict with Western culture. Here, the author uses the third-person narration, and the narrator describes the story peacefully and objectively. Although the words the author uses are simple, plain, she describes the life of a famer family vividly. Land is the symbol of the novel, and the main characters' love for the land is permeated in this novel.
O-lan is the heroine in the novel. Unlike Dai Fenglian’s publicity personality, O-lan is a silent, diligent, hard-working Chinese woman, while O-lan is also brave and wise. After she marries Wang Lung, she has contributed a lot to the family physically and mentally. Every time she gives birth to a child, she handles everything alone, which reflects her tough character. In hard times, she has never given up. When the whole family was in hunger, she tries many ways to get the food and she encourages Wang Lung to return to their land. However, her rebel is negative, and she has never thought to rebel his husband even the whole society in which women are discriminated. Before her marries to Wang Lung, she has suffered a lot in the Great House. When Wang Lung falls in love with another woman who is more pretty than O-lan and takes her home, O-lan can do nothing to stop it. From the novel, I can see Chinese farmers’ love for their land. Besides, there are many conflicts between the traditional Chinese culture and Western culture during the turmoil.
In conclusion, both the two novels are excellent in modeling Chinese local culture, but they are different in some ways, such as setting, writing style, language feature, symbol, and heroine. In addition, Red Sorghum presents a kind of firm and determined spirit, while The Good Earth pay more attention to the deｓｃｒｉｐｔion of the story.
《The Good Earth》读后感(二)：On Traditional Family Relations in The Good Earth
The Good Earth is a prestigious novel which laureated Pearl Buck a Nobel Prize for Literature, “for her epic deｓｃｒｉｐｔions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”. It depicts peasant Wang Lung’s life journey from poverty to wealth, reflecting the social background of China before the Word War I. To a large extent this book was recognized as an introduction of China to the US, seeing that it had a great influence on the general mentality of American people and chose a character who rose to prosperity from nothing, which was innovative in the literature sphere at that time.Many critics would say this novel helped prepare America in the 1930s to consider China as allies in the coming war with Japan and it went beyond the relation between the land and the people, but there is no denial that the traditional or even feudal Chinese culture is so deeply embodied in this book. From this book written in a foreigner’s perspective we can take a glimpse of the traditional family relation in China which involves filial duty, conjugal relations, relations between relatives by marriage and so forth.
Conjugal Relations
This story was supposed to be set in China before the war with Japan, a society where nearly all the feudal cultural norms, e.g. polygamous marriage, three obedience and four virtues for women and foot binding, kept intact but doomed to be devastated. These discriminatory practices are all depicted in the Good Earth. It was not decent for a noble man to marry a girl with her feet unbound and a wealthy man could have concubines at their will. Also we can judge from the diction like “slave” and “harlot” that sexual discrimination at that time was still prevailing. All of these factors put women at that time in an inferior position in a family. In this male-dominant society, females were considered machines for reproduction, whose value was to serve the men and give birth to a boy or goods to sell when impoverished.
This point is well indicated in this book. For nearly all his life, Wang Lung despised, or at least not satisfied with O-Lan’s big feet, though she bore him sons and kept all the miscellaneous things in order.
“ He saw with a instant’s disappointment that her feet were not bounded.”
O-Lan was constantly called the good slave. In their marriage, Wang Lung decides and O-Lan obeys, for she has nothing to do with things outside their house. Even when Wang Lung had his concubine Lotus, she just sulked silently, still working industriously for Wang Lung but never for Lotus.
Here, O-Lan stands for the common figure of Chinese rural women, who are obedient, industrious and faithful to their husband. O-Lan knew exactly what kind of fate a woman must face, for she herself was sold in to the Great House as a slave. By the end of her life, she was still frugal notwithstanding Wang Lung’s great property.
“ Only she pushed more grass and straw into the bowels of the oven, spreading it as carefully and as thriftly as ever she had in the old days when one leaf was precious enough because of the fire it would make under food.”
And Lotus, a girl sold into the tea house, pursued cozy life and extravagance incessantly but never worked. Compared with O-Lan’s industriousness, she was more like a toy for Wang Lung. On one hand, her entrance reveals the decay of Wang Lung’s self-awareness and modesty. On the other hand, she represents men’s suppressed want for women, an ideal image with her feet bound, figure slim. Their erotic fantasy was just an escapism from the firm conjugal bond. But in most poor countrymen’s point of view, this conduct was still inappropriate, for Wang Lung’s father still branded Lotus as a “harlot”.
These two characters represented well enough lower-class women’s position at that time -- to be slaves still, or to be sold as prostitutes. And as such, two different conjugal relations derive from here. O-Lan and Lotus’s contradiction can be seen as a contradiction between two conjugal relations or one between a wife and a concubine, or to speak further, a contradiction between frugal life and a fantastic prosperous life. The conjugal relation varies with one’s status and wealth. Even when a woman were in the position as Lotus who was far from a slave, she still could not get away from the discrepancies between genders. If a woman were not used in a family, she’d be consumed by men however.
We can perceive this contradiction when we read O-Lan’s last words.
“ Well, and if I am ugly, still I have born a son; although I am but a slave there is a son in my house. How can that one feed him and care for him as I do？ Beauty will not bear a man sons.”
To the last moment of her life, she was well aware of her identity as a woman whose responsibility was to bear a man sons. And also, she did not show any hatred for Wang Lung, for a wife could never go against her man and also she had turned her dissatisfaction into the envy for Lotus which finally resulted in her decease.
The only exception in this book is the Old Mistress of Hwang who was depicted as a widow in a falling wealthy family. Her high position in the family was much supported by her age rather than gender. If a girl from a poor family was to be sold as a slave or prostitute, one from a great family was to be wed and serve and bear baby for one exclusive man. There seems to be no essential distinction in their tragic fate.
Filial Duty
It is a common sense that Chinese culture or even the southern east Asian cultural sphere was greatly shaped under the influence of Confusion’s culture. In Ru’s doctrines, one should be well contented in family relations for he shall be filled with love of parents, siblings, friend, spouse and the monarch. Individual feelings were somehow omitted or bound with social relations. As Granting Titles to God(《封神榜》)illustrated, the hero Ne Zha striped away his flesh to return it to his mother and bones to his father. Afterwards, he bestowed his soul in a lotus and became immortal. It indicates that, in the context of traditional Chinese culture, one must get rid of the constraints of earthbound duties if he is to be a protagonist.
o it is in the good earth.
“ As for the old man, he fared better than any, for if there was anything to eat he was given it, even though the children were without.”
“’Now that,’he cried,’for speaking so to your father’s generation! Have you no religion, no morals, that you are so lacking in filial conduct？ Have you not herd it said that in the Sacred Edict it is commanded that a man is never to correct and elder？’”
The feudal filial conduct had so corrupted people’s mind that they believed morbidly never to correct an elder was the so-called filial conduct. One could never compromise on the hierarchy of generation in no matter what cases. What really mattered was not the filial conduct of an individual, but the mentality of people who would criticize the juniors for their misconduct.
It also resulted from the morphology of Xiao Nong society where people were inseparable from land. This labor pattern reinforced the stability of abode and immobility of social classes. As Fei Xiaotong described in his work,
“The people they see everyday are the ones they have known since childhood, just as they know the people in their own families. They do not have to select the kind of society they live in; they are born into it; choice is not a factor.”
If Wang Lung were willing to go against his uncle, he could absolutely vent his anger on him and move on to another place regardless of other people’s chit-chat. But confined to the bond to earth, he was forced to carry his reasonable filial duties as well as unreasonable ones.
《The Good Earth》读后感(三)：Great insight into the Chinese character
This book was shared in the Book-crossing Programme in Hongqiao International Library. To know more, please visit http://www.douban.com/people/50946105/
A reader attending the book-crossing praised the novel as “offering great insight into the Chinese character through the exploration of the Chinese relationship with the land”. The novel is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932, and was an influential factor in Buck winning the Novel Prize for Literature in 1938.
《The Good Earth》读后感(四)：胡适评《Good Earth》
1933年7月3日，胡适在前往美国途中，在夏威夷有Mrs. Dillingham赠送一本Mrs. Pearl Buck的小说Good Earth（《良田》），并对胡适说“你到美国，处处必有人问你对此书的意见，你还是让我送你一本，在船上读了他”。可见这本书在美国应当是热销书。胡适对此书评价如下：
此书实不甚佳。她写中国农家生活，甚多不可靠之处。如第一回写王龙的结婚实太简单，写其妻生第一子时尤不近事实。写她逃荒从安徽某地到江苏某地，火车上走了约一百英里，住了下来；其地有“大学”两处，此何处耶！
王龙逃荒回去，囊中有钱了，在路上用金子买一只牛，我读了忍不住大笑！（此回买牛，凡三次提起金子（gold））。
王龙的大儿子已受城市的学校教育了，而仍然要他的妻子裹小脚，亦是可怪。此书写的是革命以后，而王龙的女儿与媳妇都裹小脚！（第一回已写剃头店劝王龙剪辫子了，是此书开始即在革命以后；其时王龙尚未结婚。到他死时，应该是民国三四十年了。）
抄自胡适1933年7月3日日记。胡适著，曹伯言整理：《胡适日记全编》（06），合肥：安徽教育出版社，2001年9月版，第240-241页。
《The Good Earth》读后感(五)：外国人用英语写中国农民却给我留下了难忘的记忆
昨天下午到今天上午几乎一口气看完了这本书。现在回想起这本书，还在我脑子回荡的是一些故事，一些话，生活的态度，或者仅仅是沉默。这本书大绝大部分我觉得是写得很真实的，比如Olan 掐死刚生下来和女儿，传说吃人肉等等，这些在那样时代以至于很多年后时代在乡下都有这样的事发生。看到这些悲痛化做悲痛的文字的时候我们又能怎么样呢。我们知道了在一个大人都活不出来的时候，这些可怜的新生儿能怎么办。更不要说现在讨论it's bad to eat dog meant, or It's immoral to use a embryo to research. or human rights,or free speech.
I still remember these words “the little fool of me gives me more joy than all the other”, and musing at Wang Lung's father's contentment whether in good days or bads, O-lan's alsways be speechless, and bound this second dauther's feet because if not, her daughter would be like her not loved by her husband, O－lan packed two pear under her breast but then went to Lotus' earings, O-lan gives birth to her children silently and then goes back to field to work shoulder by shoulder with her husband,
但是也有一些我不明白，或觉得作为一中国人看起来有些奇怪的东西。王龙会他的小儿子抢女人，而这个小女孩子居然说自己更喜欢老的。还有这里把男人的lust写得太强了，特别是那些刚长大，或正长大的男孩子。
《The Good Earth》读后感(六)：读的是英文原版，只能写中文。
看书的时候看到阿兰生了第一个儿子，然后她给儿子喂奶那时候开始，心里就不知为甚产生了一种不舒服的感觉——我一直在想这是一种什么感觉，直到阿兰死了，这种感觉才慢慢消失——我猜测大概是厌恶。
我一直用中国小说的思维和那段历史来猜测这本书的结局，结果和我所想相去甚远，Wang Lung竟然没有悲剧性的结尾。我十分讨厌阿兰，竟然掐死自己刚出生的孩子——就因为是个女孩！实在无法忍受！可悲的女人！天知道我有多高兴看到她自作孽不可活——她抢来的珠宝成就满足了他的丈夫，也给她带来了最终的悲剧！
我一直觉得我的人性扭曲，再看下去我非疯了不可！
不得不说，这部小说让我认识到自己并不十分喜欢孩子，一个足够。