"A Dog Is Not a Dog" is a black humor unit novel. The story unfolds from a dog's perspective, but the cracks in "human" consciousness are frequently exposed in the narrative. Whenever it encounters "identity failure" (social death) in a certain era, it will passively travel to the next historical or mythological scene: from the shattering of Cinderella's glass slipper after her marriage, to the tight spell on the westward journey; from the lies of the Trojan Horse, to the exile of the Seven Sages in the Bamboo Grove; from the silence of the medieval court jester, to the powerlessness of the Waterloo battlefield, to the ruins of Doomsday.
In these seven reincarnations, "dog" symbolizes the imposed social attributes and external identity, "person" is the true self that longs for existence but is constantly suppressed, and "master" is the irresistible power structure. The novel uses absurd logic and unreliable narrative to uncover a core proposition: when a person is stripped of all social labels and identity attachments, is he still considered a "human"?
A black fable about identity dislocation, existential dilemma and the price of freedom quietly unfolds in the gap between the barking of dogs and human thoughts.
