The story may be interpreted as a political allegory. An allegory is a narrative in which characters, objects, or events represent something independent of the actual story told. As William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard state in A Handbook to Literature, ‘‘Allegory attempts to evoke a dual interest, one in the events, characters, and setting presented, and the other in the ideas they are intended to convey or the significance they bear.’’ This story may be read as an allegory of the cold war that dominated global politics from the late 1940s to the end of the 1980s. The cold war pitted the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, against each other. The Soviet Union had been a U.S. ally during World War II, but its communist ideology, its postwar control over most of Eastern Europe, and its desire to further spread its influence beyond its borders brought it into conflict with the democratic, capitalistic West. The conflict was called the cold war because there was no actual fighting directly between the United States and the Soviet Union, although they did take sides in numerous regional conflicts.
One characteristic of the cold war was the nuclear arms race. The United States had developed the atomic bomb during World War II, and it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. These bombings brought the war to a speedy end. For a few years, the United States was the only nation that possessed a nuclear weapon, but the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949. This led directly to the arms race. In response to the Soviet acquisition of the atom bomb, the United States developed the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, testing the first such bomb in 1952. The Soviets followed, testing a hydrogen bomb less than ten months later, in 1953. Throughout the 1950s, the arms race continued.
The two superpowers in the cold war thus resemble the two cities in the story. When KwanSi builds a wall, the first city feels threatened by it. The inhabitants believe they could be destroyed by the pig-shaped wall, so the first city tries to counter what it sees as an aggressive move by the other city. The rivalry and fear continue to escalate in a series of tit-for-tat measures, just as it did in the 1950s during the cold war. In the cold war, each side felt threatened by the other and felt the need to respond by developing more and more powerful weaponry in an attempt to gain the advantage. Each nation had the capacity to destroy the other. Each nation feared that the other might strike first, crippling its own ability to respond. The dominating factor was fear.
In this way, ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ has a level of meaning beyond the surface events of the story. Although it is set in ancient China and consists of a rather fantastic plot involving the shaping of city walls, the allegorical level of meaning gives it a particular relevance for the 1950s, when the story was published.
The story might also be thought of as a fable. A fable is a form of allegory, usually a short story in which animals talk as if they were human, but a fable can also feature human characters. The main point of a fable is that it is has a clear moral, often but not always stated in a maxim at the end. The implied moral of this story is that it is better to cooperate than to fight.
Setting and Symbolism
Although the setting is not stated explicitly, the story seems to be set in ancient or medieval China. The setting can be deduced from the Chinese-sounding name of one of the cities, Kwan-Si, and the fact that the rulers of the cities are called mandarins. The period in which the story is set can be deduced from the fact that there is no modern technology in the society depicted. The building of the city walls involves huge amounts of manual labor. The Mandarin says his builders ‘‘must go bearing trowels and rocks’’ in order to construct a new wall, and it appears that all the inhabitants of the city contribute to this effort: ‘‘Everyone carried stone to the walls.’’ Moreover, the city celebrates the new wall with fireworks, which are believed to have been invented in twelfth-century China, during the Song Dynasty, although it is unnecessary to try to date the story with this degree of specificity.
The ancient setting is important because it makes the symbolism of the story more believable. Setting and symbolism work together. To make the story work, the author needed to set it in a culture with a prescientific view of the world. Ancient cultures, including but not limited to China, took a more magical and superstitious view of the world than people do today. This is conveyed in the following passage:
“Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance.”
In a culture such as this, symbols become reality. The city that because of the shape of its wall looks more powerful and prosperous will attract more people to it and will flourish while the other city declines. While in the story this is presented as a matter of life and death (which suggests that the shapes of the walls might be symbolically interpreted as representing deadly weaponry), at another level of interpretation, perhaps the attitude of the inhabitants of these cities is not so different from two rival cities today trying to enhance their image to get a better share of the tourist trade.
Sara Constantakis, Thomas E. Barden – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 28 (2010) – Ray Bradbury – Published by Gale Cengage Learning.