Narrative Technique
There’s something interesting going on in chapter 11 of Dream of the Red Chamber that you might not have noticed.
The interesting bit is that the narration is interrupted time and time again by people coming in and out, and other random events.
It seems that the important part of this chapter in the overall narration is to establish the natural death of Qin Keqing. As I’ve noted before, scholarship on Dream of the Red Chamber has established that Qin Keqing was originally supposed to take her own life as a result of the adulterous relationship she had with her father-in-law, Jia Zhen. It seems that chapters 11 and 12 were expanded and modified a bit to carry the narrative forward before Qin Keqing’s untimely demise, which comes in chapter 13.
But the fascinating thing here is that the narrative isn’t straight and predictable. It’s interrupted all the time by all sorts of odd events.
