It doesn't seem to make much sense for the novel to find the root of culture and find Bing Zi, a mentally retarded person who lives outside the culture. The novel Daddy Daddy takes Bingzai as the protagonist, based on the exploration and thinking of the ontological meaning of human life. Bing Zi can only say two sentences. His sentence "X Mom" has no practical significance and can be regarded as a symbol. Such a life without the ability of human language symbols, its existence value can be almost equal to the existence meaning of ordinary animals. Cassirer, a famous western thinker in the 20th century, defined man as a symbolic animal in On Man. In order to explain the definition more accurately, Cahill explained: "Symbolic thinking and symbolic behavior are the most representative features of human life, and it is indisputable that all the development of human culture depends on these conditions." In this sense, the essential difference between human beings and ordinary animals lies in the cultural attributes of human beings. Without culture and language symbols symbolizing human culture, people are no different from ordinary animals. Based on Cassirer's definition of man, examining the life state of the man with the head of a chicken, the meaning of Bingzai's life becomes a reference for the existence and meaning of other characters' lives in the novel. The existence of Bingzai seems to be worthless. It's better to be alive than dead. However, it is he who lives forever, always wears open-backed pants, has a runny nose, an abscess, a huge and empty head drooping, and his forehead is covered with wrinkles-a little old man who stays at the age of thirteen forever. This image symbolizes a situation that human beings often encounter, a state of being unable to grasp the world, unable to express themselves, weak and helpless. His immortality symbolizes human weakness and insignificance.
The understanding of the meaning of human life is like what Bing Zainiang said: "As soon as the vegetation falls, it will go." Living in the world, the biggest wish of a cock-headed man is to have a "word" to live. The novel wrote: "Conversation is also a very vague concept, and people who have just arrived here still don't understand it for a long time. It seems that a son or son-in-law with money, skills and a beard will have a dialogue. The younger generation dedicated their lives to fighting for words. " This can be regarded as the Seli people's explanation of the meaning of individual life. In this sense of life, Bingzai's mother delivered the baby with scissors of "cutting shoes, sauerkraut and nails" and cut out several generations in the cottage. In this state, the life of the race continues stubbornly and irrationally. There is a mysterious meaning between individual life and racial life. In this novel, the writer seriously discusses the relationship between individual life, racial life and even human life, their formation and the difficult process of survival.
From the perspective of modern consciousness, Daddy expresses a rational criticism on the national cultural form, probes into the life noumenon consciousness under this cultural form, and tries to find out the bad roots buried in the national cultural psychology from the cultural point of view that cause the survival dilemma of modern China people. It is from this perspective that Han Shaogong's root-seeking consciousness in "Daddy Daddy" is in the same strain as Lu Xun's enlightenment thought of exposing the "national inferiority".