Reaction to a significant passage of the Good Earth "And O-lan in the house was not idle. With his own hands he tied the mats to the beams and took the earth from fields and the he mixed it with water and repaired the walls of the house, then he rebuilt the oven and filled the holes in the floor that the rain had washed." There is no doubt that the symbol of the earth in Buck's novel, The Good Earth, is so powerful as to permeate and bind the entire tale. It is presented repeatedly throughout the novel, through a gentle allusion or direct statement. No one can dispute that the land itself is a vital component to any farmer's livelihood, so it is not surprising that the farmer. Wang Lung places so much value on his lands; however, there is a separate element of the land that Pearl S. Buck highlights in her tale of a peasant's prosperous rise in feudal China, that element of regeneration and revitalization that is so evident in this selected passage from the book. Many times in the book the land dragged Wang Lung through hardship and hardship, and it was the only constant factor in his life, even as things changed: people die, great houses fall, war and famine rage, and the Inner turmoil plagues his world. same being. Despite all these obstacles, the land was always there, waiting for Wang Lung, whether as a poor farmer or a rich village man, to return to it and draw from it those ever-present qualities of life and healing. The very words of the selected passage are full of these qualities, as Wang Lung and his family, returning from the south to his land after a great and terrible period of famine, close those horrible years through the almost magical substance of the earth. It is symbolic how O-lan the wife, taking care of the structure of the farm house (a symbol itself in the Wang family) uses the "land of the fields" to repair the walls of the house - thus the ailments of the "house" are healed by the richness of the land . All the "holes" created by the past "rain" are "filled". Nowhere in the book is the meaning of the land better presented than in this passage. If taken less literally and more figuratively, one can witness everything the land does for Wang Lung throughout the entire tale. Through the hands of his faithful wife (who are an extension of his own hands, as are all the workers he hires in the latter part of the book) the land is an agent of life, healing and prosperity..