Comparison Between Sun Wukong and Achilles: A Study on Chinese and Western Heroes

Comparison between Sun Wukong and Achilles: A Study on Chinese and Western Heroes

Abstract

Heroes in the literature are definitely critical for presenting the spirit and virtue of different cultures in the world and become prevalent subjects in the researches on cultures and societies. Aiming at the study on the similarities and differences between Chinese heroes and western heroes, this paper concentrates on the comparison between two typical, imaginary heroes – Achilles, a well-known western hero, and Sun Wukong, a famous hero in the east. Besides, this study can also reflect the differences and the similarities between Chinese and western cultures and thus leading to a better understanding of the insight of the value of two cultures mentioned above.

This paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter will include introduction to the background of this study, literature review and the originality of this study. The second chapter concentrates on the comparisons between Sun Wukong and Achilles in several aspects, such as origins, characteristics and achievements. The last part is for the conclusion of this study.

Key words: Sun Wukong, Achilles, Comparison, Western Culture, Chinese Culture

Chapter 1: Introduction

1. Background of Research

It is true that imaginary heroes in literature were created whenever they were needed by the cultures and folks. The images of heroes created in the literature may diversify as different authors establish and develop their own spirit and value under the impacts of various cultures. Therefore, heroes created in different periods of history of a certain country can no doubt show the traits of the country’s culture and are definitely worth studying and researching on to grasp better understandings of a culture. Additionally, jettisoning some differences among manifold heroes, we can also find out some aspects or traits of those heroes are just in common, which can help us to study the same spirit and value from different cultures and catch up with the pace of cultural globalization. Hence, both differences and similarities among the mythological heroes are crucial in the cultural study. For the purpose of studying Chinese and western cultures, this paper picks two heroes coming from Chinese cultures and western cultures respectively, who are Su Wukong (a famous hero from the well-known Chinese novel, Journey to the West) and Achilles (a typical hero from the Greek masterpiece, Homer’s Epic), and makes comparisons among different aspects, such as origins, characteristics and achievements between those two heroes selected as subjects.

1. Literature Review

Here is the literature review of some studies regarding the heroes included in this study:

For the previous studies focusing on the comparisons between Sun Wukong and Achilles, Zeng Xianwen (1997) studied the similarities among the characteristics and personalities of Sun Wukong and Achilles and found out that both heroes could represent the thought that the fates of human beings were tragic; Guo Ying (2010) had a contrastive study of Chinese and western orientations embodied in the characterizations of Sun Wukong and Achilles by comparing the value orientations of Sun Wukong and Achilles and found that Sun Wukong and Achilles were similar at the beginning and both were born with the spirit of anti-authority and counter-tradition, but the social environment changed Wukong into a collectivistic hero later and made Wukong different from Achilles, the individualistic hero.