"The ordinary Washe commentary, hidden the secret of salvation..." This is a lyric of the "Water Margin" TV series soundtrack, although slightly exaggerated, but still incisively summarized the "light" and "dark" of the book. The so-called "ming" refers to the plot written on the surface, and the so-called "dark" refers to the truth hidden behind the text and worthy of careful exploration.
When Cao Gong wrote "Dream of the Red Chamber", he liked "grass snake gray line, thousands of miles", which is a common technique used by novelists to make the whole story full of readability and more literary value. When Shi Nai'an wrote "Water Margin", he also left a lot of foreshadowing in the text, which at first glance seems to be inconspicuous, but when he reads it carefully, he can find mysteries, such as two strange phenomena in the original work:
First, there are 108 generals on Liangshan, the first in the list is "Tiankui Star Hu Baoyi" and the timely rain Song Jiang, counting down, in order, Lu Junyi, Wu Yong, Gongsun Sheng... Duan Jingzhu, the "Earth Dog Star Golden Retriever" who has been counting to the last place, is actually no good man with the surname Zhao. It should be known that when Shi Nai'an gave names and surnames to characters, some of them were based on the archetypes of historical figures, and some of them were combined by themselves.
Then he has a lot of room to play freely. People with relatively rare surnames such as "Huangfu" and "Xie" in good Han have common surnames, and various common big surnames (Yang, Li, Zhu) are also common, except for the Zhao surname that ranks first in "Hundred Family Names", is it not very strange? Some people say that Shi Nai'an avoided the song dynasty emperor's surname "Zhao", so he deliberately omitted this surname.
But this argument does not hold water. If Shi Nai'an really avoided how the Emperor of the Song Dynasty did, why did he write a novel that caught people's sore feet? Is it to avoid embarrassment by not allowing a good man with the surname Zhao to fight a good man with the surname Zhao? Not necessarily. In contrast, the author is more inclined to Shi Nai'an deliberately "leaving blank", and remembers that the black whirlwind Li Kui shouted a sentence in public when he was first recruited in Liangshan:
"Your emperor's surname is Song, and my brother's surname is also Song, so you can't be an emperor if your brother is an emperor?" Song Jiang does have his own people in history, but he is not as powerful as in the book. This "Song" word means that Song Jiang is qualified to replace the Great Song, but Song Jiang is thinking of Zhao'an, and it is not as clear as Li Kui: In addition to Zhao'an, there are other roads, and Song Jiang said that I went to the black one way.
Therefore, Liangshan already has a "representative" of the Zhao family, Song Jiang, and Shi Nai'an has no need to design a good man with the surname of Zhao, so that at the same time, it is also a metaphor that Song Jiang is the role of leading the good men to the Zhao family. After saying this, let's take a look at what is the second strange phenomenon in the Water Margin: Since none of the good men have the surname Zhao, what are the characters with the surname Zhao in the text doing?
There are officials who escort and arrest good men: Zhao Hu and Zhao Neng, and there are Fang La's generals: Zhao Yi, but none of them have the other two Zhao family members who have contributed greatly to promoting the plot: First, Zhao Yuanwai. Lu Zhi deeply sympathized with the suffering of the father and daughter of the Jin family, killed the town of Kansai with three fists, and fled to Yanmen County, Dai Prefecture, and met them again, and Elder Jin led him to a house outside Zhao Yuan——
This house is the property of Zhao Yuanwai, and Jin Cuilian has become zhao Yuanwai's outer residence. Look at another Zhao family figure: The Song Huizong Zhao Tuo and the Zhao Guanjia family sitting on the dragon chair. This is also a strange person, the ladies and ladies in the palace he can't look up to, have to learn from the folk rich man in the capital to raise a foreign house, his outer house is the famous Li Shishi, Li Shishi led Liangshan's recruitment plan.
The two main Zhao family members are busy raising foreign houses, and the secondary ones are also making enemies with the good men of Liangshan, so it is interesting to sum up, what does Shi Nai'an want to express in this way? The good people of Liangshan were all "sent" to the road of Zhao'an by the Zhao family? The biggest possibility is that Shi Nai'an did not shy away from it, but used this surname to satirize the imperial court.