(1) "Use the era of Qu Yuan to symbolize our present era". Qu Yuan is a masterpiece of "making the past serve the present". The playwright revived the anger at that time to Qu Yuan's era. He saw the historical similarity between Qu Yuan's anti-Japanese pattern and China's anti-Japanese pattern in the early 1940s from the opposition between Qu Yuan's position as an important figure of "Zonghe School" and "Lian Heng School" and the leader of domestic anti-Qin school and pro-Qin school. The play uses various techniques such as the symbol of the characteristics of the times, the metaphor of the struggle situation and the analogy of the enemy's strength, and achieves the creative purpose of inspiring people to sum up historical experience and serve the real struggle.
(2) Qu Yuan is a poetic historical figure, and Guo Moruo is famous for studying Qu Yuan in history. He paid special attention to Qu Yuan's ideal of caring for people's livelihood, his personality image of "self-cultivation and family harmony" and his lofty integrity of serving the country with death. In the historical drama Qu Yuan, Qu Yuan was poeticized. The author of the play is not mainly describing the real individual in this period of history, but focusing on creating an image of soul of china with extensive symbolic significance. Qu Yuan's love for the people, patriotism, hatred of evil, self-cultivation and peace of mind in the play are mainly subjective freehand brushwork, not objective realism. Guo Moruo wants to rekindle the national spirit with "Qu Yuan Soul".
(3) Poetic artistic interpretation. The main characters and background in Qu Yuan have historical basis, but some minor characters and all the drama plots are created by the author. The artistic fiction in the play is mainly to express the author's poetic interpretation of history and characters. The first scene is about Qu Yuan's praise of oranges and tangerines. If it is a realistic drama, this scene should explain the time, place, background, relationship between characters, events and their ins and outs, but all these are diluted and omitted by the playwright. What he cares about is what kind of scene is fictional, which can lay a poetic foundation for the plot and the shaping of the protagonist. The second act, the framing of Qu Yuan after coming to the south, is a completely fictional event. The third act of "evoking the soul", the fourth act of Qu Yuan's crowing with a long knife and the fifth act of "Ode to Thunder and Electricity" have gradually completed the poetic shaping of Qu Yuan's soul.
(4) In terms of drama structure, it compressed Qu Yuan's historical time and concentrated historical space. This kind of treatment can certainly make the plot more concentrated and the conflict more acute; But more importantly, it dilutes the content of objective reproduction and strengthens the content of subjective expression, which is convenient for poetic interpretation of history and characters.