Status Updates From The Journey to the West, Re...

A funny observation you can make about Pigsy is that he's always looking for a chance give up the journey and go home. Several times now something happens and his first response is 'That's it then, we may as well go our separate ways.' You sense he really does want to go back to his 'wife' and live in Gao Village.

Another variant of an earlier story, Wukong kills some bandits who confront Tripitaka. Unhappy at Wukong's excessive violence and murder (he beheads one who we are pointedly told is the son of a kindly farmer who helps the travellers), Tripitaka is unusually harsh in this story. Wukong is back to being Superman after his recent defeats. Him laughing off the various blows dealt him remind me of early Superman comics.

I realise now it's easy to picture these stories as performances. The formulaic repetition from story to story is only obvious when they are collected in book form. Any one of them performed on its own would just be a familiar Journey story. Only when you read them consecutively do you notice many are just variants of the one.