Starry River of the Sky

The stories told by Rendi, Madam Chang, and Jiming are both part of the narrative and separate from the novel’s overall structure, making them representative of how Storytelling as a Self-Portrait. These stories offer additional context to further explain the inner motivations of the characters who narrate them, allowing all three characters to relate important events from their pasts. In Rendi and Jiming’s case, these events are critical to understanding the characters’ larger roles within the interwoven stories. For Madam Chang, the stories serve a slightly different purpose, for her tales foreshadow her true identity and hint that the myths of old are true. For all three characters, these stories strip them to their emotional cores by showing key moments that contribute to the major decisions in their lives. In this way, the stories show who each character truly is and how their true selves influence their choices.

When viewed as separate entities from the overarching narrative structure, the stories serve as a literary device that helps the novel to explore the very nature of storytelling from different angles. There is a wide variety of stylistic choices that the author could have made to convey this information, including flashbacks or conversations, and while these methods would have been just as efficient at delivering details, they would not have offered the same insight into the characters. Because each story is a fictionalized version of the narrator’s personal history, it provides a direct window into the speaker’s thoughts and feelings. Thus, Lin conveys Rendi’s fear and sorrow, Jiming’s anger, and Madam Chang’s difficulties in a very immediate fashion, rather than an indirect recounting of past events through third-party sources. The story format also allows the narrative itself to take place in the present so that the focus remains on how these tales affect the characters who hear them. With a flashback, the story would play out in a character’s mind and would not reaching an external audience. Such a format would keep the stories from having any external impact.