Sijie utilizes the symbol of the narrator’s sheep coat to illustrates the importance of literature by demonstrating how it’s used to help expand intellectual liberty. A gift from the villagers from the boys’ arrival, the sheep coat is highly valued like any other clothing the tailor makes. The coat is small and can fit a limited amount of passages. It had a wide range of textures and consisted of a rawhide interior. The narrator replicated his favorite passage of Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët. As he copies down the chapter where Ursule somnambulates, he states that “I longed to be like her: to be where Ursule somnambulates. I longed to be like her: to be able, while I lay asleep on my bed, to see what my mother was doing in our apartment five hundred kilometers away, to watch my parents having supper, to observe their gestures, the dishes on the table, the colour of the crockery, to sniff the aroma of their food, to hear their conversation... Better still, like Ursule, I would visit, in my dreams, places I had never set eyes on before…” (58-59). He becomes hopeful to fulfill his unquenchable desire for learning and experiencing the western literature. The narrator fills that literature and his newfound intellectual liberty will only be exacerbated by future encounters with Western literature, as he keeps it close to him on the sheepskin coat.
The next morning, Luo borrows the narrator’s sheep coat on a trip to see the Little Seamstress. When Luo returns, he briefs the Narrator on the Little Seamstress reaction to his writing. She was overwhelmed with knowledge, as “[his] coat was resting on her hands, the way a sacred object lies in the palms of the pious”(62) in silence. The Little Seamstress’s reaction reinforces the narrator’s sense of enthusiasm towards the transformative literature. The analogy comparing the coat to “a sacred objects” shows that it is delicate and inspiring to those who are fortunate enough to read western literature. The word “pious” indicates that the narrator and the Little seamstress were believers in the limited liberal arts hidden from them as the result of the cultural revolution.
