The Burning God
68 pages • 2-hour read
R. F. KuangThe Burning God
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Symbols & Motifs
Dirt and Mud
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of racism, death by suicide, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
Due to their relatively darker skin, Rin and other Southerners are pejoratively called “dirt-skinned,” a colorist and class-based insult. The South symbolically integrates mud into their fighting uniform to show their nationalism and strength. When Rin and Souji’s forces need a uniform to distinguish them from their enemies, they don’t have enough money even for fabric to make into headbands. They cake mud onto their skin so they appear like the “Red Emperor’s very finest, baked fresh from southern dirt” (105). The poor Southern Army takes a material they have been disparagingly associated with and quite literally reclaims it into their uniform, wearing dirt as a symbol of pride in their southern heritage.
Later when Rin is able to get real uniforms made, she chooses brown so they can use natural dyes like tannins found in bark and acorns. Their first muddy uniform was born of necessity, but here Rin evokes earth even when she has other choices. This symbolizes her embrace of her Southerness, which she used to reject with shame. Now Rin believes she “was dirt. Her army was dirt. But dirt was common, ubiquitous, patient, and necessary” (456). This shift also marks Rin’s turn toward a Machiavellian populism, where she sees the number of people in the South as a strength, as they will allow her to sacrifice many lives while still having many left over. While the south’s association with dirt symbolizes their strength, Rin continues to perpetuate racist and classist associations between Southerners and dirt as she experiences The Dehumanizing Effects of War.
The Specter of Altan
Sometimes, Rin willingly visits Altan’s specter by visiting the Seal that Daji put in her mind. In these moments, Altan symbolizes penance. At other times, Altan’s specter supplants Rin’s control, commenting on her actions. Altan’s specter here symbolizes guilt and a desire for vengeance.
Rin visits Altan at the Seal to relive her worst actions. She thinks of those moments as her “absolution and her penance” (41). Her goal is to feel “the guilt, the remorse, the horror” (41) on repeat until they lose meaning. In life, Altan was physically and emotionally abusive to Rin, manipulating and frightening her. Rin feels lingering guilt over Altan’s death and the atrocities she’s committed since then, so she subjects herself to abuse in her own mind as she feeds memories about these actions to his vengeful specter.
When Rin visits Altan in her own mind, his dialogue is italicized. When Altan imposes himself upon Rin rather than the other way around, his dialogue is in double quotation marks. When she’s locked up in Chuluu Korikh and she can’t escape him, he speaks in quotation marks, telling her, “I am your mind. I’m you. I’m all you’ve got left. It’s just you and me now, and I’m not going anywhere. You don’t want peace. You want accountability. You want to know exactly what you’ve done and you don’t want to forget it” (216). Altan begins to physically and verbally abuse Rin after saying this. He is a symbolic embodiment of her guilt, abusing her as she abuses herself and thinks she deserves.
Chaghan tells Rin, “your kind linger. They’re bound by resentment and a god that feeds on it, which means often they can’t let go” (355). Speerly spirits without control, like Hanelai, are “not a person anymore” but rage embodied (357). Those that “chose the circumstances of [their] own death” (357) like Tearza, whose spirit Rin talked to in The Poppy War, have their rage tempered enough to speak, though they remain “hungry ghosts” (355). By self-immolating on Shiro’s island rather than escaping, Altan chose the circumstances of his own death. Though Rin never considers that Altan’s specter might be his real lingering spirit rather than something her mind made up, Rin’s observation of how “[h]unger was etched across his face” (41) as she relives her guilty memories, plus the fact that Altan’s dialogue appears in italics and quotation marks in different moments, gives credence to the idea that a version of Altan’s specter might exist outside Rin’s mind.
The Trifecta
The Trifecta symbolize the cyclical nature of history. The original Trifecta was made up of Su Daji, Yin Riga, and Jiang Ziya. The Trifecta were hated and ruled through intimidation. Rin, Nezha, and Kitay are positioned as a new iteration of the Trifecta. Each trifecta are the three most powerful warriors of their generation, and their actions determine the fates of millions, linking this symbol to the theme of The Dehumanizing Effects of War. When Rin sits with Nezha and Kitay, she wonders if this was how “Daji, Jiang, and Riga had once felt […] Did they love one another so fiercely, so desperately?” (534). She sees herself, Kitay, and Nezha explicitly as a historic parallel to the Trifecta, so much so that she believes she has insight into their innermost feelings.
Chaghan tells Rin that “time moves in a circle. There are never any new stories, just old ones told again and again” (404). Riga, Daji, and Jiang, and Rin, Nezha, and Kitay, are the same story told again over a new generation. Rin initially identifies with Daji and had “wanted terribly to be her” (371). Daji was a powerful and underestimated woman in a world of men who came out more powerful than all of them and successfully united a country, if only for a short while. Rin associates Riga with Nezha, as they are both of the House of Yin. Though Kitay is not a shaman as Jiang is, he serves as a gate between the spiritual and material realm through which Rin can access the Phoenix’s power, just as Jiang can open the gates between the spiritual and material realm to release the spirit realm’s menagerie.
Riga, too, comments on how “[o]ur stories move in circles,” though he tells Daji that “Ziya and I are going to break the world. And you’re going to mend it” (196). This foreshadows Rin’s eventual realization that she is wrong about which parts of the Trifecta she and Nezha correspond to. On Speer, she realizes that she is about to break “Kitay like Riga would have broken Jiang” (612). Rin realizes that her senseless cruelty, lack of empathy, and stubbornness make her a new Riga, while Nezha is significantly less cruel than she imagined and is tortured by his sense of duty and love for her, as Daji was with Riga. Just as Riga and Jiang break Nikan and leave Daji to mend it, Rin and Kitay break the world more than it has ever been broken before, leaving Nezha to mend it.
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