Throughout The Three-Body Problem, characters who have been traumatized and betrayed (especially as young people) reenact that trauma on the people around them. During the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals inform on one another in order to avoid violence themselves. American oil scion Mike Evans, who has had a terrible relationship with his father, copes with that pain by plotting for the destruction of humanity. And though astrophysicist Ye Wenjie betrays the entire human race, giving the alien civilization of Trisolaris information about how to find and conquer her home planet, she only does so because trauma and loss have shaped her own life. As a teenager, she witnessed her father, Ye Zhetai, get bludgeoned to death after her mother and sister reported him to the authorities. And later in life, when Ye allowed herself to trust her new friend Bai Mulin, he, too, betrayed her to the communist authorities. Each new heartbreak caused Ye to lose faith in other human beings, and without a family or a confidante to rely on, these various betrayals and losses “dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life.” Therefore, when Ye endangers all of humanity by collaborating with the Trisolarans, her choice to do so stems from her inability forget the hardships that she herself has suffered. Through Ye, Evans and others, the novels suggests that betrayal literally lives in peoples’ “blood,” highlighting just how thoroughly the effects of a traumatic past can impact how one moves through the world. The Three-Body Problem thus demonstrates the cyclical nature of harm: people hurt humanity because humanity has hurt them, and an individual’s trauma (especially trauma suffered at a young age) can have a lasting impact on society at large.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Trauma and Cyclical Harm ThemeTracker
Trauma and Cyclical Harm Quotes in The Three-Body Problem
The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard issue People's Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the “August Editorial”; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears. Together, they formed a condensed version of modern history.
Without intending to, Bai became a key historical figure. But he never learned of this fact. Historians recorded the rest of his uneventful life with disappointment. He continued to work at great production news until 1975, when the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps was disbanded. He was then sent to a city in Northeast China to work for the science association until the beginning of the eighties. Then he left the country for Canada, where he taught at a Chinese school in Ottawa until 1991, when he died from lung cancer. For the rest of his life, he never mentioned Ye Wenjie, and we do not know if he ever felt remorse or repented for his actions.
Chang gave him an inscrutable smile. “You will know more soon. Everyone will know. Professor Wang, have you ever had anything happen to you that changed your life completely? Some event where afterward the world became a totally different place for you? […] The entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We've been very lucky. But if it's all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: it's ended. Prepare for the worst.”
Her father left behind some records. She listened to all of them and finally picked something by Bach as her favorite, listening to it over and over. That was the kind of music that shouldn't have mesmerized a kid. At first, I thought she picked it on a whim, but when I asked her how she felt about the music, she said she could see in the music a giant building, a large, complex house. Bit by bit, the giant added to the structure, and when the music was over, the house was done […] I failed. Her world was too simple, and all she had were ethereal theories. When they collapsed, she had nothing to lean on to keep on living.
From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert […] Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old. It's hard to predict the future. I live my life day to day.
“The big moon. When I was little it was still hot. When it rose to the middle of the sky, I could see the red glow from the central plains. But now it's cold…Haven't you heard about the great rip?”
“No. What's that?”
Einstein sighed and shook his head. “Let's not speak of it. Forget the past. My past, civilization’s past, the universe’s past—all of it too painful to recall.”
“I'm Raphael, from Israel. Three years ago, my fourteen-year-old son died in an accident. I had his kidney donated to a Palestinian girl suffering kidney failure as an expression of my hope that the two peoples could live together in peace. For this ideal, I was willing to give my life. Many, many Israelis and Palestinians sincerely strove toward the same goal by my side. But all this was useless. Our home remained trapped in the quagmire of cycles of vengeance. Eventually, I lost hope in the human race and joined the ETO. Desperation turned me from a pacifist into an extremist.”
“Who was that young woman’s mother?” Wang asked.
Da Shi grinned. “Fucked if I know. Just a guess. A girl like that most likely has mother issues. After doing this for more than twenty years, I’m pretty good at reading people.”
Then she substituted the universe in Feng’s heart for the real one. The night sky was a black dome that was just large enough to cover the entirety of the world. The surface of the dome was inlaid with countless stars shining with a crystalline silver light, none of which was bigger than the mirror on the old wooden table next to the bed. The world was flat and extended very far in each direction, but ultimately there was an edge where it met the sky […] This toy-box-like universe comforted her and gradually it shifted from her imagination into her dreams […] in this tiny mountain hamlet deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains, something finally thawed in Ye Wenjie’s heart. In the frozen tundra of her soul a tiny, clear lake of meltwater appeared.
Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you're seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much faster process. We can have no seabirds, but we can't be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turn 15. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you would never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you'd have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month…These are the rules of the game of civilization: the first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.
The metallic Trisolaran spirit has infiltrated each of our cells and solidified. You really believe it can melt again? I'm an ordinary man living at the bottom of society. No one would pay any attention to me. My life is spent alone, without wealth, without status, without love, and without hope. If I can save a distant, beautiful world that I have fallen in love with, then my life has not been wasted.
