For love to cause Qiannu's soul to wander sounds like a ghost story. But Professor Yueh Heng-chun, formerly of NTU's Chinese department, believes this story is a brilliant allegory about romantic love: "If true love is missing from a person's life, although alive they will be as if dead, or else they will be whole in body but spiritually deficient."
倩娘為愛而靈魂出竅，聽起來似乎是個靈異故事，但是前台大中文系教授樂蘅軍認為這個故事為浪漫愛做了一個精采絕倫的譬喻，因為「人生若真情欠缺，雖生猶死，否則，也是形全而神虧。」