Zhou Jin, Xue Jiji's old teacher, is a old boys in her sixties, who is often despised and insulted by others. When he had no choice but to associate with businessmen, he was full of grievances when he saw Gong Yuan's license plate. In front of all the businessmen, he kowtowed and wept bitterly and rolled, "until he vomited blood in his mouth." I heard that several businessmen were going to chip in to donate a Guo-zi-jian diploma to him, so he climbed on the ground and kowtowed. Both he and Jin Fan were poor for most of their lives, and suffered cold reception and discrimination before they finally climbed up. Moreover, one is crazy and the other is crying to death, and the effect is the same.
The existence of such people reveals the decay of the feudal imperial examination system and its corrosion and poison to scholars. The author's attitude towards it is also obvious. The author used a reporter's mouth to design a panacea for this madness, which shows that the author's attitude towards the imperial examination system is profound and painful, and the author feels that the imperial examination system has corroded scholars to a hopeless level.
Through the tragicomedy of Zhou Jin and Jin Fan, this charming imperial examination system was ironically satirized. This system can't select talents, and the failure and success of Zhou Jin and Jin Fan's imperial examinations are entirely accidental. They devoted themselves to stereotyped writing all their lives, resulting in spiritual emptiness and lack of knowledge, so that they became examiners, and even the great writer and historian did not know who he was. At the same time, it focuses on describing the hue of the characters around Zhou Jin and Jin Fan in the change of fate, which profoundly shows the poison of the imperial examination system to people from all walks of life and the social atmosphere of cigar smoke.