Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

1) How is the power of imagination a major theme throughout the story?

Imagination plays a vital role in Balzac and the Little Chinese seamstress, especially because of the time and place in which the story is set. Imagination is a way for the narrator and Luo to escape the tyranny of the Chinese Revolution. The fact that the narrator and Luo are able to find hope through the creative outlets of literature, shows how the infinite powers of imagination helped them preserve their youth, event though they lived in a time period that did not accept their free-thinking.  "The only thing that Luo was really good at was telling stories.  A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it."  The musical interests and abilities of the two main characters also shows how creatively inclined they are and the extent of what they will do to express their truly creative needs, because they are influenced by music that has been outlawed by the government.  Imagination is such a prevalent theme in the story because so much realism is referenced.  Because the main characters cope with the realism by reading literature, the reader gets craftily weaved into the same imaginative mindset.  "Reading aloud full pages word for word struck me as pretty boring, so I decided to take a different approach.  I would start by reading a couple of pages or a short chapter... When I felt good old Balzac was running out of steam I would contribute little inventions of my own, or even insert whole scenes from another novel."For the narrator and Luo, literature did not simply occupy them as a means of entertainment.  Literature sparked their imaginations that had been shielded from them by the government.  Literature set them free.