Frustrated Value Pursuit and Reified Consciousness:The Tragedy of the Modern Individual in Rickshaw Boy

This study aims to examine, in formal and structural terms, how the frustration of modern value pursuit culminates in “reified consciousness” in Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy(Luotuo Xiangzi), moving beyond conventional interpretations that reduce the novel to a mere work of social criticism depicting the tragedy of Beijing’s urban underclass in the 1930s. To this end, the study adopts Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness as its theoretical framework and applies the concepts of the “problematic individual” and “reification” in an integrated manner. First, modern Beijing is defined as a non-totalistic space in which totality has collapsed, where individual actions can no longer be integrated into a unified order of meaning. Within this context, the study analyzes how Xiangzi internalizes diligence and self-reliance as absolute values and treats the rickshaw as a substitute for the lost totality. It then examines the mechanism through which repeated frustrations reduce temporal consciousness from future-oriented accumulation to present-oriented survival, transform human relations into relations of exchange and calculation, and ultimately lead to reified consciousness through self-instrumentalization and the suspension of reflective thought. In addition, the study shows how this process is intertwined with the commodification of the body and forms of inner subjugation. Based on this analysis, the study reassesses the realism of Rickshaw Boy as an aesthetic achievement that reveals the structural tragedy of the modern individual through the loss of totality and the principle of typicality. By interpreting Xiangzi’s downfall not as moral degeneration or accidental misfortune but as an inevitable process in which value pursuit is structurally frustrated and consciousness becomes reified in modern society, this study seeks to expand the interpretive horizon of Lao She’s realism.