Wang Lung Charecter Analysis

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Character Analysis: Wang Lung Wang Lung was the pivotal protagonist in the story The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Wang Lung started from the bottom, as a lowly son of a farmer, forced to betroth a slave, who spent his whole life building his way to the top. His life hit a few speed bumps, but in the end Wang lung died a wealthy patriarch with enough influence and money to possess his own concubines due to his undying love of the land, his hard working attitude, and his ever present affection for his family. Love. It was a key trait Wang lung possessed in the Novel. Time and time again his love for the land in which he was born and made all he had kept him from selling his property, or trading it away. He saw not only a monetary value in the dirt of his fields, but a sentimental value from all the blood, sweat, and tears he, O-Lan, and his children had put into cultivating crops. "There was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over... this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods . . ." (Buck) Work ethic. It is what saved Wang lung from a spiral down into poverty multiple times as he made poor decisions, such as buying lotus. He would very well have continued making poor financial decisions had he not gone back to work in his fields and managed to occupy himself. Wang Lung was fortunate of course through all of this to have a wife like O-Lan, who kept up the fields and kept money in the family during Wang's low points, but his willingness to earn success is what brought his family the reputation and funds that he left them on his deathbed. "But Wang Lung thought of his land and pondered... with the sickened heart of deferred hope, how he could get back to it... He belonged to the land and he could not live with any wholeness until he felt the land under his feet and followed the plow in

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