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Assignment Title: Assignment #4
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Literary Analysis
The Roses at the Hospital
Can Xue is a writer who always has an interesting approach in her stories. She always has
a specific effect that she normally wants to bring out in every story, setting out to achieve that
without having to worry about whether the target audience succeeds in holding on throughout the
entire story, or they got lost somewhere along the road. Throughout her stories, Xue boldly uses
dream logic, strange imagery, unexpected viewpoints, as well as utterances. Her stories are never
fully resolved or explained; her hypotheses always stay unverified and possible connections
unproved as well. Xue’s stories are normally related in a very simple style that varies from
stylishly straightforward to abrupt. In her stories, we find different symbols of causation,
narrative, rumor and more. She comes up with all sorts of styles of storytelling, even though the
stories normally lack the connective tissue that leaves too much for the reader to figure out, and
try to comprehend the few issues that fail to make sense.
In the short story “The Roses at the Hospital”, Can Xue makes use of fiction writing.
Fiction writing comprises of coming up with non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing is usually
produced as a writing that aims at entertaining the readers, or passing an author’s certain point of
view. In this short story, the little girl shouts, “Hey, you’re resting your head on three little
babies. Two of them are dead. One is still alive. You’ve pinned her legs down” (pp.108). Cue’s
main reason for using popular fiction in this story is to evoke emotion and feelings. This is seen
as the narrator claims, “I felt wronged, and tears welled up in my eyes spilled out” (pp. 109).
Can’s main goal in this is meant to entertain the reader. However, any consideration of self-
expression would be purely secondary. In this story, a series of strange little things happen to
both the narrator and the second person in some sort of a shifting, and shadowy world that
generates no logical coherence in the manner in which the events occur. One of the two
characters in the story tends to act and discourse in a both irrational and incomprehensible
manner. In this story, the traditional elements and representative modes of fictional writing in it
seems to out rightly vanish into a void. Even though the story seems to flow as readers go
through it, it feels like although easy to perceive its unconventional and somewhat absurd style,
they still find it so difficult to understand the message being conveyed at the end of the story.
It is also necessary to notice the short story’s description of its scenery. These
descriptions play a vital part in showing the social background in which a part of the story takes
place. “The wind stopped blowing, and the roses fell slowly to the lawn-one rose here, another
there, trembling as if they were alive” (pp. 109). This identifies as a unique situation, in which
two separate natural elements mix and the conflict with each other. The wind and the roses are
strong natural powers. Both natural powers symbolize a specific authority, under whose
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influence a beautiful moment arises. Mutual conflict descriptions that are contained in sceneries
tend to characterize a number of Xue’s stories. In this situation, Can Cue seems to make a
figurative illustration of her specific writing strategy in the short story.
This short story exhibits something that can be seen as a new trend in fiction: the focus of
the narrative shifts from the evil things that happen in the society to the weaknesses of human
beings. It is almost as if the significance of traditional external forces that made characters to
think before acting has diminished so much. In the story, both the narrator and the girl seem to
lack some individual moral will. They both seem to be selfish, as well as mean. Whenever one
attempts something, the other is not willing to comply. This is seen when the narrator says, “I
wanted her to get up and go with me to enjoy the roses, but she didn’t move” (pp.107-108). The
narrator also later says, “Come on, let’s go look at the flowers together! But I didn’t want to go
with her” (pp. 108).
This is short story is being told by a first-person narrator. A first-person narrator is a
point of view that is seen as a being limited and watertight in that it allows no ambiguity on the
text’s context. It feels like the field of vision that has been generated by the narrator, her
perception about what is being said or happening feels like a cage where the readers are being
held and no room for having a double vision of what might be happening from the outside. All
this means that everything including all recorded conversations gets to the readers through the
filter of a ‘disrupted’ mind of the narrator. Therefore, everything in the story is just a projection
of what the narrator has in mind. We could argue that in some way, Can Xue is obsessed with the
self, due to manner in which she decides to tell the story using first person.
The Roses at the Hospital is a story that offers itself to be read on different levels. At
some level, it depicts the narrator as a haunted soul that lacks trust in the girl. The narrator at
some point when the girl tries to get her to walk says, “I was afraid she would suddenly part the
clump of flowers and make me look at that ghost-like thing. I suggested we admire the flowers
from a distance” (pp.108). Later in the story she says, “Flustered, I threw the thing off and
swung my arms or all I was worth” (pp.109). However, at the same time the subjectivity of the
narrative voice seems to be paint a different picture of the narrator, arousing the imagination of
the reader that this might be a simple case of paranoia after all. After the girl places a twig on the
narrator’s hand, she cannot trust her and feels like it might be something bad placed on her palm.
However, the story offers a different level when the narrator finds out nothing bad had been
placed on her palm and, “I looked closely at my palm and finally saw that it was clean; nothing
dirty was there” (pp.109). It creates a sense of paranoia but at the end, readers are made to feel
like maybe the girl is in fact just and ordinary, loving and harmless person that just loves nature,
as well as teasing people. However, a closer look at the short story reveals certain complicity or
simply identification between the narrator and the girl. The girl is also paranoiac and suspicious,
talking about history of the hospital and those that died around it.
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Reference
Xue, C. The Roses at the Hospital (pp. 105-109).