The High Brow

The High Brow
In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the narrator’s coat and Four-Eyes glasses are used to symbolize perspective and intellectual liberty. The glasses are a symbol for perspective. When you look through glasses you see things in a new way. The characters all have different views on other characters and to justify the motives of characters requires you to see through different peoples “glasses.” To Four-Eyes the boys are mischievous, manipulative kids who can’t be trusted. Yet, for the narrator Four-Eyes is a selfish man who has succumbed to the communist control. The many different perspectives make this story interesting so it is quite important to look through different perspectives to see why the characters do certain things and how that might benefit them.

The narrator’s coat is the only outlet the narrator has to cherish and connect more to Balzac’s words, as shown in the quote, “It was the first time in my life that I had felt any desire to copy sentences from a book. I ransacked the room for paper, but all I could find was a few sheets of notepaper intended for letters to our parents. I decided I would write directly onto the inside of my sheepskin coat,” (58). Being able to have such a focus on the text allows him to see new perspectives. He can now identify with the author’s perspective, as well as seeing how people who don’t live in China may think. The jacket is his way of connecting and being closer to the words. It also touches on the severity of which intellectual liberty was banned, that he’s secretly writing banned words from a banned book on the hidden inside of a jacket. He has become so desperate to bask in the knowledge from the book that he has gone to the extreme of writing in his jacket. Intellectual liberty was harshly limited, and that can be seen in how desperately and committed he was writing, “By the time I had covered the entire inside of the jacket, including the sleeves, my fingers were aching so badly it felt as if the bones were broken,” (59).

“Luo and I set out at once to visit Four-Eyes. We had heard about his stroke of bad luck: as was bound to happen, the lenses of his spectacles had been broken. I was sure however, that he wouldn’t allow this mishap to interfere with his work, in case his myopia was taken as a sign of physically deficiency by the revolutionary peasants and they thought he was a slacker” (52)  

“‘Without your glasses you won’t be able to manage that mountain path...I’ve got an idea: we’ll help you carry your hod to the rice station, and when we get back you can lend us some of those books you’ve got hidden in your suitcase. How’s that for a deal’” (53)

“By the time I had covered the entire inside of the jacket, including the sleeves, my fingers were aching so badly it felt as if the bones were broken” (59).

“It was the first time in my life that I had felt any desire to copy sentences from a book. I ransacked the room for paper, but all I could find was a few sheets of notepaper intended for letters to our parents. I decided I would write directly onto the inside of my sheepskin coat” (58).