The allegory so prominent in chapter 1 mostly recedes to the background in favor of the novel’s dominant mode of custom essays a moderately satiric realism. This process occurs while Lao Ts’an assists and befriends effective and just officials who value his talents and advice—and endeavors to undo the harm perpetrated by cruel and ambitious officials like Kang Pi and Yü Hsien.

The only important custom essay variation from the dominant mode of realism in the novel after the first allegorical chapter occurs near the middle of the novel during a series of often abstruse philosophical discourses deep within a mountain retreat. This idyllic interlude essay paper functions largely to articulate custom writing the author’s convictions about the many benefits of essay writing philosophical syncretism. In this view, a selective synthesis of key ideas from the three main strains of traditional Chinese thought since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.)—Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—allows China to lay the soundest foundation upon which Western innovations can be effectively built. Both the author’s semiautobiographical protagonist and the sagacious custom essay hermit Yellow Dragon strongly disapprove of the emotional antiforeignism of the Boxers and reactionary officials, on the one hand, and the unreflective aping of the custom essays West by overzealous Chinese revolutionists, on the other.