Is Journey to the West trying to tell us that society is too dark and that only by entering officialdom can there be a way out?
Journey to the West was not a novel that mainly talked about the darkness of society. It was a classical Chinese novel about the four people, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Monk Sand, and Tang Sanzang, who went to the Western Paradise to obtain Buddhist scriptures after going through 81 difficulties. In the novel, Tang Sanzang and others encountered many difficulties and dangers, but they also obtained the true scriptures through continuous struggle and hard work. Although there were some descriptions of officialdom in the novel, it was not the main part. Journey to the West was a story of heroes fighting to save the people, not a novel that mainly talked about the darkness of society. Therefore, Journey to the West did not explicitly tell people that only by entering officialdom could they have a way out.