Adversity and Response in Journey to the West and the Odyssey: A Computational Comparative Analysis

Abstract

How do classical literary works represent personal adversity and responses to it? This study compares Journey to the West with the Odyssey through an interpretable computational framework that connects thematic measurement with literary interpretation. The Chinese text of Journey to the West and the English translation of the Odyssey are segmented within chapter boundaries into 910 and 625 text blocks, respectively. A bilingual dictionary organized around challenges, responses, goals, and values converts textual expressions into measurable features. Coverage rates and mean match counts describe their prevalence, while joint principal component analysis (PCA), following logarithmic transformation, inverse-coverage weighting, and normalization, examines variation in expression profiles. The results reveal both shared patterns and differentiated emphases. Violence and coercion occur in approximately half of the blocks in each work. Journey to the West shows broader coverage of task commitment, rescue and care, and compassion, whereas the Odyssey gives greater prominence to homecoming and courageous endurance. PCA projections display substantial overlap between the works alongside differences in their average profiles, suggesting that distinct narrative emphases coexist with shared expressive resources. The first three components explain 35.4% of feature variance, indicating that low-dimensional visualizations capture only part of the texts’ heterogeneous structures. The study provides a transparent, reproducible approach to cross-cultural literary comparison grounded in explicit bilingual retrieval rules. Its findings concern dictionary-detected expressions in two specific textual versions and should be interpreted through narrative context rather than treated as direct measurements of character virtue or general differences between Eastern and Western cultures.