Motivi norosti, brezbrižnosti in kanibalizma kot simboli družbene izprijenosti v Lu Xunovih novelah

This article analyzes two short stories by Lu Xun from his collection Outcry, which came into being at the culmination of the Chinese spiritual rebirth between 1818 and 1922. In “Diary of a Madman” and “The True Story of A Q” the author expresses his conviction that the existing system’s depravity produces “cannibalism,” causes a gradual decline in humanity, and exposes the main defects of human character. The impossibility of destroying the “iron house,” or people’s incapacity to change their “cannibalistic” nature, causes the loss of hope on the side of the “madmen” . It forces them to give up their insightfull knowledge and adapt to the majority. With the repetition of motifs such as “madness,” “indifference,” and “cannibalism,” which constantly recur in Lu Xun’s short stories, the author expressed his vision of traditional Chinese society and his pessimism about the future. At the same time these motifs reflect the author’s state of mind and his everlasting journey between hope and despair, “madness” and “indifference,” and tradition and modernity. If the stories are read in the context of twentieth-century China they can be understood as a direct criticism of the established Chinese society, whose values and norms derive from Confucianism, but they also contain deep symbolic meaning that renders them timeless