Based on the three days and two nights of the revolutionary cadre Yu Erlong's return to his hometown of Shihu, the novel traces and compares the life of the Anti-Japanese War, the Liberation War, the seventeen years after the founding of the People's Republic of China to the "Cultural Revolution" and the smashing of the "Gang of Four" for forty years. Through reflections on the fate of different characters over the decades, the novel expresses the author's disgust for "left" politics and the theme of "spring in the hearts of the people". The novel's time sequence is reversed, history and reality are interspersed, and the plot is confusing. It is a representative work of reflective literature.
