Free verse wasteland Lost generation the Jazz age The Beat Generation

Free verse wasteland Lost generation the Jazz age The Beat Generation

Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms
The nature of war. The war is not glamorized, instead, it is presented in a very real and horrifying fashion from the perspective of the ambulance driver. A tragic love story, in which man is doomed to be trapped in difficult situations and in misery. Heroism and dark humor. Catherine is able to transfer herself to the hospital where FREDERIC Is recovering. Then she flees with him to Switzerland where she dies from internal bleeding resulting from a difficult childbirth. In her death, she said “I’m not afraid. I just hate it.” The searching of identity. Frederic Henry doesn’t know who he is. He represents the whole nation, wounded in the war and disillusioned with the insanity and futility of the universe.

Why is Gatsby great? 1.he is able to create a new identity for himself when he needs to be someone else. Gatsby’s determination and audacity are amazing to Nick. Gatsby focuses on a goal, that of wining Daisy, and he does whatever is necessary to attain it. He works briefly for a millionaire, and becomes acquainted with the people and customs of high society. He studies mannerism and expressions he thought would be what the social elite would say and do. 2.Gatsby is a romantic at heart. He never veers from his goal and dream of wining Daisy, and even in the face of reality, his determination is steadfast. He has unworldly love for Daisy. He takes the blame for Daisy when she kills Myrtle. 3.his greatness is also a satire which is used by Fitzgerald to criticize the illusions that the Jazz age produced.

The Beat Generation 1950s-1960s
A loosely-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s. They shared a set of social attitudes—anti-establishment, antipolitical, anti-intellectual,opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression. Allen Ginsberg’s long poem, Howl《嚎叫》 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road《在路上》

Poet Allan Ginsberg 艾伦金斯伯格
Howl 《怒号》 Kaddish《感谢赞美》 A Supermarket in California

A Supermarket in California  by Allen Ginsberg 
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Artistic similarities between whitman and Ginsberg
That piece of work is part description, part meditation and part lament which addresses in a surrealistic fashion. Ginsberg considered Whitman as his literary idol who was regarded as the father of modern poetry. Ginsberg viewed himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed down from Whitman. The long line in that poem could also be traced back to his study of Whitman. He claimed Whitman's long line was a dynamic technique few other poets had ventured to develop further. The short poem not only acknowledged Ginsberg's debt to Whitman's vision of America as a place of possibility and abundance, but also allows Ginsberg to place himself in a tradition of gay writers. This possibility of being openly gay in America is one of the many opportunities that Whitman's poetry enabled for Ginsberg.

The New Criticism New Criticism was a highly influential school of Formalist criticism that flourished from the 40s to late 60s. New Criticism Occurred Partially in Response To Biographical Criticism that understood art primarily as a reflection of the author's life (sometimes to the point that the texts themselves weren't even read!). Competition for dollars and students from sciences in academia. New Criticism Tends to Emphasize: The formal and technical properties of work of art. The text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else. New Critical Assumptions: The critic's job is to help us appreciate the technique and form of art and the mastery of the artist. That the "Western tradition" is an unbroken, internally consistent set of artistic conventions and traditions going back to ancient Greece and continuing up to this day, and that good art participates in and extends these traditions. Similarly, criticism's job is to uphold these traditions and protect them from encroachments from commercialism, political posturing, and vulgarity. That there are a finite number of good texts (a notion now often tied to "the canon" of texts traditionally taught). The closer that a text comes to achieving an ideal unity, where each element contributes to an overall effect, the more worthy it is of discussion. Studying literature is an intrinsically edifying process. It hones the sensibilities and discrimination of students and sets them apart from the unreflective masses. That "cream rises," and works of genius will eventually be "vindicated by posterity." That there is a firm and fast distinction between "high" art and popular art. That good art reflects unchanging, universal human issues, experiences, and values. Technical definitions and analyses are vital to understanding literature. The text's relationship to a world that extends beyond it is of little interest.

American Literature 20th Century—2nd Half

Time Events 1945 Atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki WWII ended; Cold War began Korean War, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign,1954Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The Civil Rights movement: non-violent protest and civil disobedience led by Martin Luther King, Jr.1962, Cuban missile crisis1963,President John F. Kennedy assassinated Civil Rights march on Washington: Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered “I have a dream’ speech1964 The Civil Rights Act, banning segregation in public places Vietnam War,1967 Anti-Vietnam demonstrations ,1968Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated.,1969US astronauts landed on the moon Stonewall (gay rights) rebellion in New York City, Watergate scandal,1981AIDS identified in the US,1989Soviet Union collapsed; Fall of Berlin Wall; Cold War ended,1991Persian Gulf War World Wide Web introduced

Characteristics of Post-war Novels
1.Protagnists of the novels distrust any political principles, social ideal, religious doctrine or moral standards, but they feel depressed, pitiful and uneasy losing those. R: 1950s,On the Road, Jack Kerouac 2.humor has a new meaning: for the writers, everything in the world is absurd, morbid, unreasonable. Living in the world is also extremely nonsense and absurd. So they use the grotesque, fantasy and exaggeration to re-create the real world of chaos and uncertainties. This kind of painful reality is represented by the extreme sarcasms, humor became the hysteric revelry and laughters in tears. R:Catch-22, Joseph Heller, John Barth Thomas Pynchon 3.seeking Identity. Who am I? what is human? R: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Postmodern Literature
What is it? - Used to describe the different aspects of post WW2 literature (modernist literature). - There is not a clear and defined definition of postmodernism because of the little agreement of the concepts and characteristics and ideas within postmodernism.

What is Postmodernism? Postmodernism is a term that encompasses a wide-range of developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art, literature, and culture. Originally a reaction to modernism, referring to the lack of artistic, intellectual, or cultural thought or organized principle. Started around 1940s, exact date is unknown. Peaked around the 1960s and 1970s with the release of Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five

Features of Postmodernism
The term Postmodernism is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. Continuing the narrative experiments of the modernists, the first generation of Postmodernists produced texts that simultaneously questioned and violated the conventions of traditional narrative. Similarly the postmodernist language poets, inspired by the linguistic experiments of Modernism and the new ideas of post Structuralism, deployed a fractured, systematically deranged language aimed at destabilizing the systems constructed through language. The fragmentation, intersexuality, and discontinuity that characterize so much of experimental modernist and postmodernist literature find a kind of fulfillment in the inherently fragmented, intersexual, and discontinuous form of “hypertext," a computer-generated Web text with multiple branching links. Another hallmark of postmodern literature, and of postmodern art in general, is the erosion侵蚀of the boundaries between “high”, elite, or serious art and “low”, popular art, or entertainment. Postmodernism is fully exemplified in the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and John Fowles.

Basic features of the American Postmodernist Novel
Playfulness with language Experimentation in the form of novel Less reliance on traditional narrative form and character development, experimentation with point of view, experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel Mixture of “high art” and popular culture and interest in metafiction—fiction about the nature of fiction.超小说(现代小说流派或其作品,有意强调作者的媒介作用和写作技巧,忽略传统写作中对真实性的关注)

Postmodernist Literature
Postmodernist Literature contains a broad range of concepts and ideas that include: - responses to modernism and its ideas - responses to technological advances - greater diversity of cultures that leads to cultural pluralism. (small groups within a larger society maintain their culture identity). - reconceptualization of society and history

Postmodern Literature
There are a few similarities to modernist literature. Like modernist literature, both are usually told from an objective or omniscient point of view. Both literatures explore the external reality to examine the inner states of consciousness of the characters Both employ fragmentation in narrative and character construction

Postmodern Literature: Common Themes
Irony, playfulness, black humor - Example: The Crying Lot of 49, Pynchon uses childish wordplay while discussing serious subjects. An example of his wordplay can be found in the names of his characters: Mike Fallopian, Stanley Koteks, Mucho Maas, and Dr. Hilarius.

Pastiche[’pæ’sti:ʃ],拼凑的艺术作品 - Authors often combine multiple elements in the postmodern genre. Example: Pynchon includes elements from science fiction, pop culture references, and detective fiction to create fictional cultures and concepts.

Metafiction - Writing about writing, often used to undermine the authority of the author and to advance stories in unique ways. Example: In Italo Calvino’s novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the first chapter is about the writing process of the novel.

Paranoia[,pærə’nɔɪə]妄想狂 -The belief that there is something out of the ordinary, while everything remains the same. Example: In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, a character becomes violent when he imagines everyone else as a robot and he is the only human.

Postmodern Literature: Influential works
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut Lost in the Funhouse – John Barth The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien White Noise – Don DeLillo Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

Modern VS. Postmodern Modernism
Tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, sth to be mourned as a loss Modernists uphold the idea that art can provide unity, coherence and meaning which has been lost in most modern life Knowledge is scientific: learn things just to know them Postmodernism Celebrates, not mourns, the idea of fragmentation or incoherence The idea of not to be pretend that art can make meaning, but let’s just play with nonsense Knowledge becomes functional: learn things to use the information.

Black Humour definition: to deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic. It refers to the use of morbid and absurd for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters.

Features Comic way to express tragic situations以喜剧的形式表现悲剧的内容
Creation of anti-hero反英雄式的人物 Illogical narrative structure非逻辑的叙事结构和灵活多变的写作技巧。 Reveal that The purpose of the absurd society is to press humans.揭露荒涎的社会对人的压迫为目的。

黑色幽默作为一种文学流派，到了70年代，它的影响逐渐减弱，但由这一运动而产生的众多文学作品却一直是人们研究的热点，也有评论家称黑色幽默小说为后现代主义小说的第一阶段

Postmodern Authors Joseph Heller
Born May 1, 1923 in Brooklyn, New York Known for his post World War satires and playwrights Catch 22 most well-known of his works Other works include: Something Happened, Good as Gold, and Closing Time. Also wrote plays: We Bombed in New Haven, Catch 22, Clevinger’s Trail

短篇小说《我不再爱你》 (I don’t Love You Anymore,1947) 《雪堡》(Castle of Snow,1947) 《第二十二条军规》(Catch-22)的出版使海勒一举成名。1974,《出了毛病》Something Happened)讲述主人公斯洛克姆的工作经历，主要回忆了自己青少年时代的生活。《像高尔德一样好》（Good As Gold,1979）则描述了华盛顿政界的生活图景。主人公高尔德虽然讨厌基辛格，却渴望像基辛格一样取得辉煌的成就。《天晓得》（God Knows,1984）用第一人称介绍了《圣经》里大卫的故事。《这幅画》（Picture This,1988）古典希腊哲学家和画家的故事。

22- Protest novel The society in the novel is absurd. Heller aimed to present the chaos and insaneness of American society, so at this point…

Postmodern Authors Thomas Pynchon 托马斯.品钦
Born May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York. Known for his fictional writing over many different subjects that include: science, mathematics, and history Known for his early works: V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Also wrote essays concerning diverse topics such as missile security and Watts Riots ( a large scale riot that lasted six days in the Watt’s neighborhood of LA).

Pynchon’s style Pynchon's writing is extremely convoluted [‘kɔnvə’lu:tɪd] (complex),and dense. His thoughts twist and turn delightfully and rarely conclude where you were expecting, and the sheer inventiveness with which he forces the text to express his ideas is marvelous.

The Crying of Lot 49 《第49批拍卖品的叫卖》
Overall Analysis The Crying of Lot 49 was written in the 1960s, one of the most politically and socially turbulent decades in U.S. history. The decade saw the rise of the drug culture, the Vietnam War, the rock revolution, as well as the birth of numerous social welfare programs after the Democrats swept Congress in the 1964 elections. This was also the decade of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination, Civil Rights, and, to some extent, women's rights. The novel taps into this explosion of cultural occurrences, depicting a dramatically fragmented society. The Crying of Lot 49 contains a pervasive sense of cultural chaos; indeed, the book draws on all areas of culture and society, including many of those mentioned above. In the end, the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself alone and alienated from that society, having lost touch with the life she used to lead before she began her attempt to uncover the mystery of the Tristero. The drug culture plays a big part in this sense of isolation. The world around Oedipa seems to be a world perpetually on drugs, manic and full of conspiracies and illusions. And though that world is exciting and new, it is also dangerous: drugs contribute to the destruction of Oedipa's marriage, and drugs cause Hilarius to go insane. Oedipa hallucinates so often that she seems to be constantly high, and ultimately, this brings her nothing but a sense of chaotic alienation.

Many of the problems with chaos found in the novel are tied in to the idea of communication. The major symbol of order in the novel, Maxwell's Demon, cannot be operated because it requires a certain unattainable level of communication. Letters in the novel, which should be clear and direct forms of stable communication, are ultimately meaningless. The novel also contains a mail-delivery group that requires its members to mail a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. Indeed, the letter Oedipa receives in chapter one may itself be meaningless, since it is the first step in what may be nothing more than a big joke played on Oedipa. The religious moment Oedipa experiences in chapter two seems for a moment to promise the possibility of some kind of communication being communicated, but the process breaks down. Religion, language, science, all of the purveyors of communication, and through that communication a sense of wholeness, do not correctly function in the novel.

Related to the theme of the problem of communication is the novel's representation of the way in which people impose interpretation on the meaningless. It is very telling that Oedipa wants to turn the mystery of the Tristero into a "constellation," which is not really an example of true order. Solar systems are simply mankind's way of imposing an artificial but pleasing order on the randomness of outer space. It is, furthermore, an imposition of a two-dimensional structure onto a three-dimensional reality. Oedipa's quest to construct a constellation seems to indicate that she is only looking for a superficial system. Indeed, she never succeeds in figuring out the meaning behind the Tristero, and, further, the novel ends with the very strong likelihood that the mystery may hold no mystery at all. And just as she is unable to piece together the puzzle of the Tristero, she is similarly unable to refashion her life after it begins to fall apart. Even the United States government, which tries to impose an order on the world of mail delivery, cannot prevent side groups from springing up to undermine its work. There are two concepts underlying all this: puns and science. The novel is full of puns and language games of all sorts. For instance, the odd names of the novel's characters are a type of play on different words and their symbolic baggage. Another example is the concept of the word "lot" in the title, which actually occurs several times in the book but does not relate to anything in the story until the last few pages. Also, we see that Mucho's radio station spells "fuck" when read in reverse, forming another little language game that does not have necessarily any inherent meaning but does indicate an interest in manipulating language for intellectual enjoyment. Language is the means through which the story is communicated, and Pynchon has chosen to use a language full of jokes, puns, and satires. Science seems to stand in opposition to the chaos of language that all of Pynchon's manipulation suggests. Science is ordered and coherent and offers a body of definite knowledge that all can study. And yet, even the coherence of science is undermined in the existence of Maxwell's Demon and the figure of Dr. Hilarius. Though pure science may offer coherence, the uses to which that science is put, the interpretations imposed on that science, can scatter that coherence to the wind. More than anything else, The Crying of Lot 49 appears to be about cultural chaos and communication as seen through the eyes of a young woman who finds herself in a hallucinogenic world disintegrating around her.

Characters Oedipa Maas(Oedipus〈希神〉俄狄浦斯)奥迪帕 - The novel's protagonist. After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, names her executor(遗嘱执行人) of his immense and complex estate, she discovers and begins to unravel a worldwide conspiracy(密谋)in southern California. Oedipa functions in the novel as a type of detective, although the story is as much about her own self-discoveries as it is about the mystery she attempts to piece together Mucho Maas马乔马斯- The husband of Oedipa, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey赛马骑师 for KCUF radio in Kinneret加里利海. At the end of the novel, he goes crazy on LSD, alienating Oedipa.

Pierce Inverarity皮尔斯 - Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a fabulously rich real-estate tycoon. We never meet him except in Oedipa's memories, which tell us that he liked to play with his own voice by doing vocal impersonations扮演. He was a general jokester in real life and may be playing a mean trick on Oedipa by inventing this whole Tristero特里斯特罗 conspiracy.

How is The Crying of Lot 49 a mystery novel?
A good answer would mention that the book certainly has many elements of a mystery novel, including clues and a detective figure. However, most mystery novels move toward a particular conclusion--the revelation of whodunit[hu:’dʌnit]侦探小说. In The Crying of Lot 49, most of the clues are meaningless (what good does it do Oedipa to learn the complete history of the Tristero特里斯特罗 ?), and furthermore, each additional clue tends to open up more loose ends rather than close up existing ones. Also, whereas most mystery novels end with the culprit being captured, all mystery in The Crying of Lot 49 remains unsolved.

What role do letters play in this novel?
great answer would have to mention the fact that letters in this novel are good examples of failed communication. In the beginning of chapter three, for example, Oedipa gets a meaningless letter from Mucho that presumably contains only dull, pointless comments. She does not write him anything substantial either, for that matter; she will not tell him about her affair with Metzger. We also see that the people using the W.A.S.T.E. system are required to deliver mail once a week even if they have nothing to say. As a result, the system is based on the delivery of empty, pointless letters. Moreover, a letter is what sets Oedipa upon the whole mystery journey in the first place. By the end of the novel, because we have sufficient reason to believe that everything in the book may have been simply a prank(trick) on Oedipa, we must suspect that the initial letter on page one may be the beginning of falsehood.

How does the novel treat the idea of chaos in culture?
Undoubtedly, the world of The Crying of Lot 49 is fragmented. The novel blends all elements of society together in one novel that contains druggies, hippie rock singers, right-wing kooks(idiot), lawyers, Mafia men黑手党, actors, and 17th-century culture, among many other things. There is little bond holding all these random elements together. This novel sounds in many ways like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem about similar societal chaos. Faced with such a world, Oedipa seems to feel a need to put things in order. However, notice that her dream is to create "constellations."星座Constellations are great examples of how humans impose order on something that is not at all inherently ordered. Whereas a circuit board has a clear structure that works for a reason, constellations are an attempt on the part of humans to put order where there is none.

The Gravity’s Rainbow The Plot structure
The book begins with a clear narrative direction, but soon the plot begins to fragment very rapidly. Flashback-filled meditations act to dislocate the plot from linear time, and an ostensibly endless series of digressions tend to send it reeling through space as well.

characters Horst Achtfaden
Achtfaden is an aerodynamics空气动力学 man who worked on the Schwarzgerät. Enzian and the Schwarzkommando capture him and interrogate him in part 3, episode 13.

themes Death, Paranoia, and Metaphysics
Pynchon addresses a kaleidoscope of themes in Gravity's Rainbow, but he continually returns to ideas related to metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that studies fundamental questions of reality and existence. The novel questions what is real, how one is able to discern reality, and whether there actually is any reality at all. Its complex plot can be seen as a search for causes of death and a quest to discover who or what it is (if anything) that controls the world.

style Fact and Fiction Pynchon's novel is full of historical and cultural allusions from all over the world, and many of them are historically accurate details. Characters such as Walter Rathenau, numerous World War II episodes, corporate references to Shell, General Electric, and the German chemical company IG Farben, and stories from colonial Germany, Holland, and Russia are all based on thorough historical research. However, Pynchon often mixes these elements of historical fact with fiction, so it is difficult to tell what has been invented and what has been taken from history.

Postmodern Authors Kurt Vonnegut 库特·冯尼格特
Born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana Known for using Patiche in his works. Blends satire, black comedy, and science fiction to create novels, such as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. As a former soldier and prisoner of war, many of his experiences influenced his later works.

Protagonist Billy Pilgrim比利·皮尔格姆
The largely fictional part of Slaughterhouse-Five starts with the line: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" (2.1.1). And from there on out, Billy's story dominates the novel: the narrative of his wartime troubles, his witnessing of the Dresden大众星 massacre, his return to the United States, and his decades-long struggle to deal with the aftermath of World War II provide the primary material of the book. The Narrator (Kurt Vonnegut) narrator is using the characters to tell the story of his experience in Dresden. Given all the biographical detail and reflections on how we, as human beings, can cope with pain and death, we have to cite the narrator – and the author himself – as the alternate main character of the book. Slaughterhouse-Five is like a puppet-show where we can see both the puppet – Billy Pilgrim – and the puppeteer – Kurt Vonnegut. If Billy is just a puppet, then that makes Kurt Vonnegut our protagonist.

Character Analysis Billy lives a life full of indignity and so, perhaps, has no great fear of death. He is oddly suited, therefore, to the Tralfamadorian philosophy of accepting death. This fact may point to an interpretation of the Tralfamadorians as a figment of Billy’s disturbed mind, an elaborate coping mechanism to explain the meaningless slaughter Billy has witnessed. By uttering “So it goes” after each death, the narrator, like Billy, does not diminish the gravity of death but rather lends an equalizing dignity to all death, no matter how random or ironic, how immediate or removed. Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident just as Billy is about to go off to war. So it goes. A former hobo dies in Billy’s railway car while declaring the conditions not bad at all. So it goes. One hundred thirty thousand innocent people die in Dresden. So it goes. Valencia Pilgrim accidentally kills herself with carbon monoxide after turning bright blue. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim is killed by an assassin’s bullet at exactly the time he has predicted, in the realization of a thirty-some-year-old death threat. So it goes. Billy awaits death calmly, without fear, knowing the exact hour at which it will come. In so doing, he gains a degree of control over his own dignity that he has lacked throughout most of his life. The novel centers on Billy Pilgrim to a degree that excludes the development of the supporting characters, who exist in the text only as they relate to Billy’s experience of events.

Themes The Destructiveness of War
Whether we read Slaughterhouse-Five as a science-fiction novel or a quasi-autobiographical “伪自传 moral statement, we cannot ignore the destructive properties of war, since the catastrophic firebombing of the German town of Dresden during World War II situates all of the other seemingly random events. From his swimming lessons at the YMCA to his speeches at the Lions Club to his captivity in Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgrim shifts in and out of the meat locker in Dresden, where he very narrowly survives asphyxiation and incineration in a city where fire is raining from the sky. However, the not-so-subtle destructiveness of the war is evoked in subtle ways. For instance, Billy is quite successful in his postwar exploits from a materialistic point of view: he is president of the Lions Club, works as a prosperous optometrist, lives in a thoroughly comfortable modern home, and has fathered two children. While Billy seems to have led a productive postwar life, these seeming markers of success speak only to its surface. He gets his job not because of any particular prowess but as a result of his father-in-law’s efforts. More important, at one point in the novel, Billy walks in on his son and realizes that they are unfamiliar with each other. Beneath the splendor of his success lies a man too war-torn to understand it. In fact, Billy’s name, a diminutive form of William, indicates that he is more an immature boy than a man. Vonnegut, then, injects the science-fiction thread, including the Tralfamadorians, to indicate how greatly the war has disrupted Billy’s existence. It seems that Billy may be hallucinating about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians as a way to escape a world destroyed by war—a world that he cannot understand. Furthermore, the Tralfamadorian theory of the fourth dimension seems too convenient a device to be more than just a way for Billy to rationalize all the death with he has seen face-to-face. Billy, then, is a traumatized man who cannot come to terms with the destructiveness of war without invoking a far-fetched and impossible theory to which he can shape the world.

通过科幻成份，作者融入了他对科学与人类带来不幸，科学越是高度发展，人类的命运就越是岌岌可危。杀人手段从常规武器到原子弹、氢弹、凝固汽油弹、细菌弹、集束弹、精确制导炸弹等各种先进武器的发明，人类战争从马背战争到常规战、核战、生化战、电子战、信息战的不断发展，所有这些‘实验室’的胜利都说明了这一点。更为可悲的是现代科技把人变成了不具备独立思维能力的机器……《第五号屠场》已成为二战以来对战争抨击最为猛烈与尖锐的文学作品，对后人具有强烈的警示作用

The Illusion of Free Will
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut utilizes the Tralfamadorians, with their absurdly humorous toilet-plunger shape, to discuss the philosophical question of whether free will exists. These aliens live with the knowledge of the fourth dimension, which, they say, contains all moments of time occurring and reoccurring endlessly and simultaneously. Because they believe that all moments of time have already happened (since all moments repeat themselves endlessly), they possess an attitude of acceptance about their fates, figuring that they are powerless to change them. Only on Earth, according to the Tralfamadorians, is there talk of free will, since humans, they claim, mistakenly think of time as a linear progression. Throughout his life, Billy runs up against forces that counter his free will. When Billy is a child, his father lets him sink into the deep end of a pool in order to teach him how to swim. Much to his father’s dismay, however, Billy prefers the bottom of the pool, but, against his free will to stay there, he is rescued. Later, Billy is drafted into the war against his will. Even as a soldier, Billy is a joke, lacking training, supplies, and proper clothing. He bobs along like a puppet in Luxembourg, his civilian shoes flapping on his feet, and marches through the streets of Dresden draped in the remains of the scenery from a production of Cinderella. Even while Vonnegut admits the inevitability of death, with or without war, he also tells us that he has instructed his sons not to participate in massacres or in the manufacture of machinery used to carry them out. But acting as if free will exists does not mean that it actually does. As Billy learns to accept the Tralfamadorian teachings, we see how his actions indicate the futility of free will. Even if Billy were to train hard, wear the proper uniform, and be a good soldier, he might still die like the others in Dresden who are much better soldiers than he. That he survives the incident as an improperly trained joke of a soldier is a testament to the deterministic forces that render free will and human effort an illusion.

Slaughterhouse-Five Theme of Fate and Free Will
In Slaughterhouse-Five, the primary upshot of what Billy Pilgrim learns from the plunger-shaped aliens is: if we cannot change anything about time, there is no such thing as free will. After all, free will means the ability to alter your own future. In fact, the Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the whole idea of free will seems to be unique to Earthlings. Everyone else in the universe knows better. Billy uses this knowledge to comfort himself about the realities of aging, death, and pain. Even if human beings have to suffer, at least there is nothing to be done about it.

Theme of Time Billy Pilgrim and the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five both spend a fair amount of their time reliving their experiences in World War II. The narrator recalls the war through personal memory, historical research, and travel with his war buddy to Dresden大众星 , the site of his most painful experiences. Billy travels to the past a little more literally: he never knows when he's going to be sent from his optometry practice or his home right back to the POW compound or the slaughterhouse in Dresden where he spent part of the war. Billy has so little control over his own life that he doesn't even know when he will be, let alone where, from one moment to the next. His only cure is to take refuge in the beliefs of the Tralfamadorians: that death, free will, and time itself are all illusions.

Theme of Suffering From Billy's excessively realistic crucified Christ to the horses with shattered hooves in the rubble of Dresden(德累斯顿Germany) much of the suffering in Slaughterhouse-Five explicitly targets innocents. Billy is a foolish, inexperienced boy who is sent to the front lines of a war he does not understand. The injustice of suffering – that it should strike the people who seem least equipped to understand or deal with it – is yet another reason Billy turns to science fiction and Tralfamadore to make himself a new reality. His current, agonizing reality no longer makes any sense to Billy, so he needs another one.

Theme of Morality and Ethics
The Tralfamadorians are pretty clear that their novels hold no moral lessons for readers. After all, what would be the point of a moral lesson when you can't do anything to change the future? Slaughterhouse-Five, with its stars and tiny sections, seems to be imitating a Tralfamadorian novel. So it makes sense that the narrator doesn't spend much time preaching about right or wrong: that's not the point of this book. If the book were really trying to deliver a moral message, the narrator's emphasis on the suffering of the Germans in Dresden might have to be balanced out by a much longer meditation on the Nazis' concentration camps. What Vonnegut seems to be asking his readers to do instead is to think about how much human suffering the war brought for both sides. Some of the most evil characters in the book – Bertram Copeland Rumfoord and Paul Lazzaro – are the ones who think they are absolutely right. This kind of righteous self-assurance is what leads to war in the first place.

Theme of Foolishness and Folly
Because Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war book, Vonnegut isn't presenting us with any heroes. And to counteract the impression that any of the men in the novel have the self-determination or free will to make heroic choices, Slaughterhouse-Five relies a lot on absurdity. Billy Pilgrim is described repeatedly as clownish; he looks so ridiculous that a German surgeon on the streets of Dresden criticizes him for making a mockery of war. Paul Lazzaro and Roland Weary are both so self-absorbed that they don't even seem to notice that they are on a battlefield half the time. And even poor Edgar Derby, who is so idealistic and committed, can be reduced to tears by the unexpected taste of syrup[‘sirəp]糖浆in his mouth by the end of the war. Still, the real foolishness in the book is not at the individual level. We can't help but think there must be something wrong with a system that would send poor, innocent Billy Pilgrim to war.

Theme of Men and Masculinity
In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator promises Mary O‘Hare that he will write a novel about World War II that will not attract the attention of manly men like John Wayne or Frank Sinatra. One way in which Vonnegut certainly succeeds in making war seem utterly unappealing is by emphasizing the hunger and illness of the soldiers fighting it. Paul Lazzaro’s stomach is shrunken with hunger, Edgar Derby weeps at the taste of syrup, and all the American POWs spend their first night in the British compound with explosive diarrhea. The book really foregrounds the unattractive, absurd realities of male bodies under stress. The only soldiers with big muscles and washboard abs(水手） are the English officers, who have been prisoners for the whole war, and who barely fight.

The Importance of Sight
True sight is an important concept that is difficult to define for Slaughterhouse-Five. As an optometrist optometrist [ɔp'tɔmitrist]验光师 in Ilium, Billy has the professional duty of correcting the vision of his patients. If we extend the idea of seeing beyond the literal scope of Billy’s profession, we can see that Vonnegut sets Billy up with several different lenses with which to correct the world’s nearsightedness. One of the ways Billy can contribute to this true sight is through his knowledge of the fourth dimension, which he gains from the aliens at Tralfamadore. He believes in the Tralfamadorians’ view of time—that all moments of time exist simultaneously and repeat themselves endlessly. He thus believes that he knows what will happen in the future. One can also argue, however, that Billy lacks sight completely. He goes to war, witnesses horrific events, and becomes mentally unstable as a result. He has a shaky grip on reality and at random moments experiences overpowering flashbacks to other parts of his life. His sense that aliens have captured him and kept him in a zoo before sending him back to Earth may be the product of an overactive imagination. Given all that Billy has been through, it is logical to believe that he has gone insane, and it makes sense to interpret these bizarre alien encounters as hallucinatory incidents triggered by mundane events that somehow create an association with past traumas. Looking at Billy this way, we can see him as someone who has lost true sight and lives in a cloud of hallucinations and self-doubt. Such a view creates the irony that one employed to correct the myopic view of others is actually himself quite blind.

Symbols The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?”
The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre, and “Poo-tee-weet?” seems about as appropriate a thing to say as any, since no words can really describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing. The bird sings outside of Billy’s hospital window and again in the last line of the book, asking a question for which we have no answer, just as we have no answer for how such an atrocity as the firebombing could happen. The Colors Blue and Ivory On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy’s bare feet are described as being blue and ivory, as when Billy writes a letter in his basement in the cold and when he waits for the flying saucer to kidnap him. These cold, corpselike hues suggest the fragility of the thin membrane between life and death, between worldly and otherworldly experience.

The Horses After the bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim and several POWs return to the slaughterhouse to pick up souvenirs. Billy does not actually spend much time looking for things; he simply sits in a green, coffin-shaped horse-drawn wagon the POWs have been using and waits for his comrades. As Billy lies in his wagon in the afternoon sun, two German doctors approach him and scold him for the condition of his horses. The animals are desperately thirsty, and in their travel across the ashy rubble of Dresden, their hooves have cracked and broken so that every step is agony. The horses are nearly mad with pain. Billy weeps for the first and last time during the war at the sight of these poor, abused animals Given that this scene is the only time Billy cries during the whole war, it must be pretty significant. In fact, the parallels between the horses' suffering and Billy's own seem striking. These horses have no way of understanding the destruction around them, nor the orders being given to them. With no way of protesting their treatment, they obediently keep walking through the ruins of Dresden even though every step on the sharp rocks damages their hooves. Like Billy himself, the animals are innocent victims of great suffering without ever understanding why. No wonder Billy finds himself in tears. There is also a parallel between the horses and Roland Weary, the first character we see die in the book. Weary is the bully who attempts to shoot Billy before the Germans capture both of them. When the Germans take Weary prisoner, they force him to exchange his excellent boots for a pair of wooden clogs a German recruit is wearing. The clogs are so rough on Weary's feet that he injures himself marching, gets gangrene, and dies. Weary's bloodied feet appear at the beginning of Billy's wartime experience, and the horses' cracked hooves at the end. Perhaps the suffering of the horses reminds Billy of all of the terrible, pointless pain he has seen in this war, starting with foolish, violent Weary and ending with the Dresden firebombing.

The Stars You may have noticed that the tiny sections in Slaughterhouse-Five are separated by little rows of three stars. These are not just there for decoration; Billy Pilgrim discovers that all Tralfamadorian books are laid out this way (5.3). The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the stars contain their own short messages to create a single, beautiful scene. Slaughterhouse-Five uses a lot of elements from the fictional part of the novel, and specifically from Billy's experiences on Tralfamadore, to structure the book as a whole. Not only do the stars in the Tralfamadorian novel appear throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, but the fact that the book is told out of chronological order fits the Tralfamadorian concept of time. (Check out Billy Pilgrim's "Character Analysis" for more on this). And the Tralfamadorian idea that there is no point in moralizing since we can't change the past or the future may explain why Slaughterhouse-Five does not offer a single, easy moral lesson. By using elements from the made-up part of the novel to structure both the autobiographical and the fictional sections of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut suggests to the reader that all of Billy Pilgrim's adventures are part of the same overall narrative. The plot may distinguish between the narrator's and Billy's stories, but they both emerge from the same place: Vonnegut's efforts to write about the firebombing of Dresden. The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five never lets us forget that "Billy Pilgrim" is a thinly disguised fictional device Vonnegut can use to ponder the trauma of war – and the big questions of life and death – while still telling a pretty good story.

Prayer and Montana Wildhack's Locket
Montana Wildhack wears a locket on which is written, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference" ( ). The same words appear framed on Billy's optometry office wall in Chapter 3, Section 12. We find this prayer really striking for two reasons. First, the prayer appears in both Billy's real life and his Tralfamadorian life, strongly hinting that his Tralfamadorian experiences are made up. He has taken bits and pieces from things he has seen in his daily life and read in science fiction novels to make up a world he wants to live in. Second, this prayer expresses something profound that Billy is really looking for. He does want to find a way to accept what he cannot change (the past), the courage to change what he can (his current reality), and the wisdom to tell the difference. In a sense, Tralfamadore is all about granting this prayer: the Tralfamadorian belief in unchanging time means nothing can be changed, so there's Billy's serenity right there. And Billy's abduction gives him a perspective on his reality, which allows him to find the courage to tell the world about his new philosophy – to try to change humanity's sorrow and pain over death. It's pretty brave to try to change the world. Note that even though this is a prayer, it's the Tralfamadorians that grant Billy this new serenity and courage, not God. God in the novel is strongly associated with the pain of death. Billy's mother's crucifix focuses on the agony of the crucifixion, and Kilgore Trout's two novels about Christ both emphasize his death and its purpose. Billy has seen enough pain and suffering among the innocent in his own life; he doesn't need Christianity to give him new examples. Instead of turning to the suffering Christ, Billy looks to space aliens for relief from his misery.

Nestled Like Spoons," and "Blue and Ivory"
"A lot of the imagery in Slaughterhouse-Five repeats across sections and in different contexts. For example, the narrator describes his own breath when he is drunk as "mustard gas and roses" (1.3.2) – which is what his dog, Sandy, specifically does not smell like (1.4.14). This is also the odor of the corpses at Dresden a couple days after the firebombing, which Billy Pilgrim discovers as he digs through the rubble of the city in Chapter 10. This repetition of description serves to connect the "Billy Pilgrim" portion of the novel with the narrator's own personal memories and experiences. Other examples of repetition of imagery include descriptions of characters "nestled like spoons": Billy and the hobo/private in the prison boxcar (3.29.3), Billy and his wife Valencia (4.1.2), and the American soldiers on the floor of the shed in the British compound (6.10.1) all nestle like spoons as they sleep. There is also Billy's "ivory and blue" (4.1.4) bare feet as he walks barefoot through his Ilium, New York home, the "blue and ivory claw" (4.5.1) of his cold hand clinging to the vent in his boxcar on the way to a German POW center, and the "blue and ivory" (6.16.4) feet of the dead hobo lying outside the train that will take Billy to Dresden. The repetition of these phrases – mustard gas and roses, nestled like spoons, and blue and ivory – demonstrates that no part of this story is isolated from any other. Each section, as brief as it may be, fits into a larger consideration of wartime and its aftermath.

Writing Style Dry, Stark
The novel's writing is minimalist and dry, and Vonnegut tends to write in short, declarative sentences. Each tiny section is dense with dialogue and action. Still, even amidst all this straightforward, unadorned writing, there is an element of black humor. The book sets out the terrible conditions Billy will be living with, but it doesn't stop there. It adds the awful irony that, even though these conditions are so terrible, the war keeps making them worse by piling on more and more prisoners. Slaughterhouse-Five is filled with blunt, grim ironies like this one, which is why we describe its style as stark.

What is the relationship between the structure and the content of Slaughterhouse-Five?
The novel’s random, skipping timeline presents an effective method of representing one man’s inability to live a normal life after experiencing modern warfare. The disjointed collage of Billy Pilgrim’s life gets translated directly to the disjointed collage of the narrative. We experience Billy’s life as he does, without suspense or logical order, randomly orbiting about the firebombing of Dresden. A traditional novel might start with a youthful Billy Pilgrim and follow him into old age or with an elderly protagonist who flashes back on his life. Billy, however, adopts a Tralfamadorian attitude because it is the only way he can make sense of the loose grip on time he is left with after the war. In order to follow him, the narrative approximates the same attitude. A Tralfamadorian novel, as discussed in Chapter 5, contains urgent, discrete messages describing scenes and situations. The author of such a novel carefully chooses the messages so that, when seen all at once, they form a profound image of life. Otherwise, there is no obvious relationship among them—there is no beginning, middle, climax, or end. Humans, of course, cannot perceive all the elements of a novel at the same time. We can only approximate this effect like we approximate motion on film—with quick snapshots shown in rapid succession. Showing the snapshots in chronological order yields a traditional linear narrative; shuffling them up yields the closest approximation of a Tralfamadorian whole. Vonnegut entrusts his long-in-the-making Dresden book to a Tralfamadorian template in the hopes that it will produce something profound and beautiful from the memories of a massacre.

Briefly discuss some of the consequences of a Tralfamadorian view of the universe for a human.
The Tralfamadorians see all of time simultaneously. They know what has happened and what will happen and are able to focus on the nice moments. Things always happen the way they do because of how moments are structured, and no one can do anything to change the future. In fact, the concept of change is difficult for a Tralfamadorian to grasp. To them, free will is just a bizarre fiction discussed on Earth, where people cannot see in four dimensions. All time is fixed, but each moment is always accessible to Tralfamadorians, so they can pick and choose what they want to experience. Each moment essentially exists forever. Without free will, there seems to be no accountability. There is also no time wasted in blame and punishment. Billy does not blame anyone for what he sees in Dresden, for what he experiences in the war, or for the death of his wife. He simply accepts that things happen as they happen. There also seems to be no incentive to live one’s life well (according to whatever definition one might have of living well). As long as every life has a few good moments, the time traveler can eternally visit those and be eternally content. However, judging from Billy’s experiences, humans do not seem as able to control time travel or remember with the same selectivity as Tralfamadorians. Billy has no say in his comings and goings through time. Thus, he relives atrocity and horror as much as he relives moments of happiness. If atrocities also last forever to be eternally relived, perhaps there is incentive not to act atrociously after all.

How does Vonnegut’s technique of time-shifting affect our understanding of the novel? Is there an advantage to structuring Slaughterhouse-Five in the “telegraphic schizophrenic manner”? If not, is it too random to allow a cohesive, linear story to emerge? A linear story does emerge out of the jumble of time-shifted details in the novel: the story of Billy Pilgrim, POW, making his way through time and across the European theater of World War II toward Dresden, the scene of ultimate destruction. Every time we return to this thread of the narrative, it unfolds in chronological order. Interspersed in this order are wild zigzags forward and backward through Billy’s life. These time jumps might be confusing, but they give force to the horror we encounter along the way. Vonnegut feeds the novel’s emotional momentum with the transitions between time jumps. For example, in Chapter 3 Billy is transported from his bed in Ilium, where he weeps after seeing cripples in the street, to the POW march in Luxembourg, where he weeps because of the wind in his eyes. Such transitions take the place of traditional narrative devices such as foreshadowing. Vonnegut gives away the climax he had been considering for his grand narrative (Edgar Derby’s execution) in Chapter 1; when we finally get to the telling of it, at the end of Chapter 10, it comes as an afterthought. In addition, the novel might be schizophrenic, but it is not random. On the one hand, death strikes indiscriminately, and we never know who the next victim will be. But, on the other hand, the sheer volume of seemingly random deaths adds up to an emotional weight like that of the Tralfamadorian novel described in Chapter 5.

二战以来对战争抨击最为猛烈与尖锐的文学作品，对后人具有强烈的警示作用。

Realism in the Modern Period

Jerome David Salinger 杰洛姆·大卫·塞林格 J．D塞林格
1951 《麦田的守望者》（The Catcher in the Rye） 20世纪的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》在现代化的世界里霍尔顿找不到自己的归宿，他企图像美国小说中许多无辜、孤独的英雄一样，到乌托邦的西部，在深山老林中与自己心爱的姑娘一起过着简朴的美满的生活。然而，他逃脱不掉社会的现实，所有这一切只不过是梦幻而已。战后失望的一代对现实社会的不满，描述了他们在成长过程中所感到的困惑

The Catcher in the Rye a novel narrated by main character and hero Holden Caulfield, is the story of Holden‘s life in the few days after being expelled from his Pennsylvania prep school. Published in 1951 by J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye has been banned more times than you want to count by zealous parents and educators. but interestingly, it's also frequently used as part of high school English classes. With more than 60 million copies sold to date, it's one of the world's top sellers The Catcher in the Rye is close to J.D. Salinger's heart; he has never allowed it to be produced as a film. The Catcher in the Rye ended up as an emblem of counterculture in the 1950s and 60s – a symbol of alienation and isolation for the disillusioned and restless post-war generation. Salinger's own isolation from society only amplifies the mystery and allure of this important book.

Rye Narrator: First Person (Central Narrator)

Setting Pencey Prep School and New York City in either 1948 or 1949.

Writing Style Slang and Otherwise Frowned-Upon Language
Since Holden is narrating his own story, the style of the novel is the same as the style of his own language, which is colloquial and distinctive. He talks directly to you, as in "You'd have liked [Allie]." He uses italics to make the words read with the same emphasis as spoken word ("He's my brother and all"). You'll hear him describe places and people all the time as "corny" or "phony." He'll tell us he's never waited anywhere so long in his "goddamn life. [He] swear[s]" (24. 97), or that he's sweating "like a bastard" (24.100). The Catcher in the Rye, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn before it, is one of few books to feature this language in the narration itself, not just in dialogue. At the time, this was both unusual and important – not just as a new literary style, but also as a way to study the vernacular of a particular time period. Which reminds us – the language doesn't seem all that offensive to us (PG, maybe), but at the time (1951) it raised a few more eyebrows.

Tone Cynical, Judgmental, Humorous, Compassionate, Sad, Digressive [dai‘ɡresiv]离题的

The Catcher in the Rye Summary
The Catcher in the Rye begins with seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield jumping right in – with a lot of attitude and dated profanity – to tell us about "this madman stuff" that happened to him "around last Christmas." His story begins on a December Saturday at Pencey Prep School in Pennsylvania, where he's just been given the ax (read: kicked out) for failing all his classes except English. Turns out, getting the ax is a recurring theme in Holden's past. He visits a friendly teacher of his, Mr. Spencer, who lectures him about the "future." Back in the dorm, Holden goofs around with Robert Ackley, a pimply and annoying kid. We're introduced to Holden's distinctive red hunting hat, and we meet his roommate, Stradlater, who is a "sexy bastard" getting ready for a date with Jane Gallagher, an old friend (and sort-of-romantic-interest) of Holden. Holden is none too happy about this impending date, but agrees anyway to write an English composition for Stradlater, who, in addition to being attractive and athletic, is also a "moron". Holden's composition gives us some insight into his character; he writes about his younger brother Allie, who died three years earlier of leukemia. More specifically, the composition is about Allie's left-handed baseball mitt, which had poems written all over it in green ink (so that Allie would have something to read while out in the field). Holden reveals that on the night Allie died, Holden broke all the windows in the garage with his bare hand. As a result, he still can't make a good fist with his hand. Stradlater comes back and Holden tries to figure out if anything happened (in the sex sense of "anything") with Jane. Stradlater is evasive, so Holden tackles him and gets the worse end of the scuffle (a bloody nose). He tries to chat with Ackley for company, but ends up so fed up with everyone and everything that he decides to leave Pencey, right then and there. Everyone leaves for Christmas break on Wednesday, so he has to bum around New York for a few days before going home (otherwise his parents will know he's gotten the ax). On the train away from Pencey, Holden has a conversation with the mother of one of his classmates, Ernie Morrow. She's quite an attractive older woman. While Holden knows that Ernie is a "phony bastard" (by the way, Holden thinks everyone is a "phony bastard"), he pretends that Ernie is God's gift to the world to make his mother happy. Holden also pretends his name is Rudolf. Holden gets off at Penn Station in New York, wants to call someone but can't decide whom, and ends up taking a cab to the Edmont Hotel. On the way, Holden asks the cabbie if he knows where the ducks in the park go when the water freezes over. The driver doesn't know. Once he's gotten a room at the Edmont, Holden tries calling a girl who he knows is a good time, but fails to make a date with her. In the hotel lounge, he dances with three "moron" girls, only one of whom is attractive. He isn't allowed to drink, since he's obviously a "goddamn minor." This, among every other person, event, and place in the novel, Holden finds to be depressing. The girls take off, and Holden reminisces about Jane Gallagher.

What Holden describes is some sort of puppy love; he and Jane used to golf together, play checkers, go to the movies, and hold hands and so forth, but there wasn't much in the way of anything sexual. One instance he reveals suggests that Jane may have been molested by her stepfather. We can start to see why Holden was so upset about her and "sexy" Stradlater on a date. Holden gets into a cab with a guy named Horwitz, asks him about the ducks (seems he's really concerned about them), and goes to "Ernie's," since he knows he'll be able to drink there. When he runs into an old and annoying acquaintance, he leaves to avoid having to spend time with her. Back in his own hotel, he somehow ends up with a prostitute named Sunny in his room. He's more into talking than sex, and Sunny, who's quite young herself, gets confused and leaves his room with a little of Holden's money but no sex. She comes back later with her pimp, Maurice the elevator man, and Holden ends up with a punch in the stomach (they wanted more money than he paid Sunny). The next day Holden leaves his hotel, makes a date with an old friend named Sally Hayes, and meets two nuns while he's having breakfast. One of the nuns is an English teacher, so they talk about literature – Romeo and Juliet, in particular. Holden has a hard time talking about a "sexy play" like that with nuns. He makes a donation to their collection. After he leaves, he buys a record for his little sister, Phoebe, and overhears a boy singing, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." More on this soon. Holden heads to the park to kill some time before his date with Sally. He chats with a girl in the park as it becomes increasingly clear that Holden likes children a lot more than adults. Thinking on the museum he used to visit as a child, he remarks on how the displays behind the glass cases always stay the same, but the children that visit are different every time. He meets Sally for a "phony" matinee show and then goes skating with her. By now, he's pretty fed up with the general craziness of city life and shares with Sally his fantasy of running away, living in a log cabin, and doing log-cabin-y things for the rest of his life. When Sally is not so partial to running away with him, Holden flips out. Alone yet again for the evening, Holden calls up an old acquaintance from school, Carl Luce, and arranges to meet him for drinks. At the bar, Carl takes the annoying "I'm soooo mature" attitude, so the night ends early. Well, it ends early for Carl. Holden stays alone at the bar and drinks himself into fuzzy oblivion. After trying to make a date with the coat-check girl, he goes to the park to look for the ducks. Seeing no ducks, he heads home to visit his sister Phoebe, who we've been told is the greatest girl in the world. Phoebe does in fact appear to be the greatest girl in the world. She's the first person we see Holden have any sort of genuine interaction with; they talk about her schoolwork and then, quite cheerily, the fact that Holden doesn't like anything or anyone except his dead brother Allie. Of course, he finds this depressing. He says all he wants to do with his life is be the catcher in the rye – if there were a bunch of children playing in a field of rye next to a big cliff, he'd be the guy to catch them before they go off the edge. Phoebe informs him that the "song" he heard about the catcher in the rye is actually a poem by Robert Burns, and it's about bodies meeting bodies, not catching bodies. Holden leaves home (to avoid his parents) and visits an old teacher, Mr. Antolini. He gets another long lecture on the importance of education, and experiences what may be a sexual come-on from his former teacher. Holden bolts, and reveals that "perverty" stuff like that has happened to him a lot. He spends the night in the train station, and gets even more depressed. Holden decides to run away, informs his sister Phoebe of as much via a note left at her principal's office, tries to rub several "fuck you" signs off the walls of an elementary school, and finally meets up with Phoebe. She has decided that she wants to run away with him. Holden explains this isn't possible. Phoebe gets angry and pulls a "Fine, I'm not talking to you anymore." Fortunately, being mad at someone doesn't mean you won't go to the zoo with them, which she does. They end up at the carousel, where Holden promises Phoebe that he won't run away after all. As he watches her go around and around on the carousel, he declares he's happy, which is the first time we've heard him say that in the novel. At last, we pull out of the narrative and back to the Holden of one year later, the one who was telling us this story. He's clearly in therapy for getting "sick" in some way. He says he's supposed to go back to school in September, but he's not sure whether or not things will be any different (that is, any better) this time around. He concludes that he sort of wishes he hadn't told us this story at all, since relating it makes him miss all the people he'd met.

Theme of Innocence The narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an adolescent obsessed with saving children from the dirtiness he sees in the adult world. The novel deals with innocence in many forms, but focuses often on the sexual. Because the narrator sees sex in any form as dirty, he feels the need to separate children (and himself, somewhat) from it, instead of easing into it as a natural step to becoming an adult.

Theme of Mortality The Catcher in the Rye explores that traumatic effects that first-hand experiences with death can have on an individual. The narrator, seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield, lost a younger brother to leukemia four years before the story is told. He was also witness (at least by ear) a young boy's suicide at prep school. These events leave him – and therefore, the story he narrates – plagued with nearly constant thoughts of death and mortality. The Catcher in the Rye is riddled with symbols of death and disappearance, which Holden often focuses on to avoid interacting with the real and living world around him.

Theme of Youth The Catcher in the Rye presents a clear distinction between the world of children and that of adults. Children are genuine, caring, and kindhearted, whereas adults are "phony," self-centered, and generally "bastards." Because the story of told from the point-of-view of a disillusioned seventeen-year-old, we of course have to challenge the bias inherent in this perspective. The novel examines the grey area between these two worlds – namely adolescence – and the painful process of transitioning from one to the other.

Theme of Isolation Isolation in The Catcher in the Rye refers to the personal, social, and mental isolation of one individual, seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield, from the rest of the world. The novel explores the tension between the desire to observe, judge, and alienate with the need to meet, converse, and connect. We constantly see the desire to reach out mitigated by hesitation and passivity.

Theme of Sexuality and Sexual Identity
Sexuality is a big concern for narrator and protagonist Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old boy. He presents the point of view that sexuality is inherently degrading for a woman, and therefore cannot reconcile acting sexually toward a woman that he respects. The Catcher in the Rye also includes mention of possible childhood molestation, and examines the way in which such events affect young adults as they try to understand their own sexuality.

Theme of Sadness Sadness permeates The Catcher in the Rye. Main character Holden Caulfield finds nearly everything depressing, from receiving gifts to hearing people say "please." The conclusion drawn, however, is that isolation and alienation from others is the greatest source of unhappiness. The difficulty comes from the fact that escaping this isolation is a battle in itself – one that can often be, unfortunately, quite depressing.

Theme of Wisdom and Knowledge
The Catcher in the Rye implicitly gets at the question of knowledge vs. wisdom. How relevant is formal education as compared to the experiences one gains by simply living life? Several points of view are presented within the novel: that institutional education is only intended to teach kids how to make money; that there is an inherent value to knowledge and learning that formal education is a necessary step by which to avoid squandering native talent. The conclusion is left up to the reader.

Theme of Lies and Deceit
Deception in The Catcher and the Rye takes the form of what narrator Holden Caulfield calls "phoniness." ['fəuninis] 虚假 This refers to anything and everything from pretense to social snobbery to language to appearances – all elements of the adult world as opposed to the world of phoniness. Disgusted with this falsity, Holden seeks to escape what he sees as the prescribed path of education, jobs, and money-making.

Theme of Madness The big question in The Catcher in the Rye is whether or not the central character is crazy. The story begins with a seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield telling his own story of a year earlier, with mentions of his having come "out here" to "rest up." What is normal adolescent behavior, and what is psychotic? This novel explores that very question, but the conclusion is left up to the reader.

Theme of Religion The Catcher in the Rye treats religion much the same way as it does education. There may be an intrinsic(inner) value to it, but it's been ruined by institutions and the people that run them. To the seventeen-year-old narrator, the biggest problem with religion is the social barriers that religion creates (which he directly compares to the social barriers created by money).

Comparison between Rye and Finn
Self Discovery in Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield make journey into self-discovery. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn is trying to find purpose and identity through conflicting of morals. While Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, is an adolescent struggling to find mature into manhood. In comparison, they are both on a journey towards maturity and identity. Life itself is a journey full of bonding and experiences which lead to wisdom and understanding. Without maturity one may never have these essential experiences. This leads to an empty shell of a person, never truly feeling passion, love or peace.

Huck Finn is a young boy deciding which morals to hold true
Huck Finn is a young boy deciding which morals to hold true. The quest for what's right is long and confusing. During his adventure is forced to choose between his morals and his conscience. When Huck runs into the bounty hunters he is forced to make one of these decisions. He must choose whether to turn his run-away slave friend Jim as his conscience advises or to trust his morals and protect his friend in need. Fortunately, his will is strong and he creates an elaborate lie to prevent Jim's capture. Huck seeks refuge in nature, where right and wrong don't exist and life's beauty is what is truly important. He mentions that nature is peaceful and he need not worry about either his morality or conscience but is allowed to ponder these personal discrepancies. Holden Caulfield, however, has a much more complex yet equally important struggle. His struggle is of his own hypocrisy and misunderstanding. This struggle can be overwhelming for some and it is for Holden who requires help to come to terms with maturity. Even though he is constantly speaks as if he is experienced in connection and bonding, they were always just faÿ ades. Holden thinks he is superior to his environment because he has a false knowledge of it and it's workings. This is best explained by his reaction his old friend June whom he would like to have a meaningful relationship with but cant come to grips on how. Inspite of all he thinks he knows he is really only the faker he despises. Both Huck and Holden must complete their own journey's to become complete individuals. This journey is only a step on the staircase of life which ultimately leads to inner- peace and happiness. Each experience is unique and powerful but are essential to getting the whole picture. What Huck finally comes to terms with is that life's questions should be answered from the heart. He also decides that humanity has evolved into a corrupt species whose ideas aren't worth the headache. His answer is to flee society and all of it's constraints and live in nature where he is free from civilization. Holden has a tougher decision to make since he must completely reverse his thinking completely. The first step is to realize his hypocrisy which he was able to do but couldn't truly solve his problem and was forced to seek professional help in the end. Fortunately, both characters ultimately progress onto the next step by some means outside the conformity of normality.

Rebellion main characters of those novels are rebellious in some way. Huck, and Holden are all misfits in the society they have been placed in. Therefore, each of their societies shuns them b/c they appear "flawed". In reality, the society itself is flawed; we can see this by the negative way the characters are treated, & through the character's own negative opinions of their situation and those they encounter.

their themes are closely related.
Such as the racism vs. phoniness that are portrayed, also the education vs. growing up, and self-protection vs. the civilized society are all themes that the two authors bring up. the authors used the protagonists as a means to comment on the society of the day.

lack of protection Life for children without a secure home to live in is a rough and unstable way of living, especially when growing into maturity. The two novels, The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn show this lack of protection, as well as the maturity levels that affect both boys. Holden Caulfield is cynical when he gazes into the mist of a world that appears distorted. For Huck Finn, it is not the same because it is his conscience he struggles with. Both of these characters lack the sufficient guidance that they need to survive in society - it is their role models that help them through these issues as time progresses. Both novels show two boys growing up in a society that has refused to grant them a sense of security and a loving family.

Suffering from loneliness and isolation
The fact that both characters are often playful and adventurous does not hide the fact that they both suffer from loneliness and isolation. Holden Caulfield’s isolation is more severe because of the fact that he is fighting a losing battle to keep his innocence while under pressure from the rest of the world and has no companions to aid him. The Catcher in the Rye is marked by Holden’s ongoing search for companionship as he repeatedly calls up old acquaintances that he did not even care for and asks new people he meets to sit down for a drink with him. Huck shares with Holden the intense feelings of isolation remarking many times that one thing or another made him feel very “lonesome.” Unlike Holden, Huck has a best friend in Tom Sawyer but like Holden, Huck is often isolated from his peers such as in the beginning of the novel, when the boys of Tom’s band of robbers want to cut Huck out of the gang.

one has distrust for the integrity or motives of another person in the world
J.D. Salinger and Mark Twain show the reader how people can see the world as a place where one has distrust for the integrity or motives of another person. This is shown widely through Holden Caulfield in the way he describes the people he comes into contact with. These are people who the reader would consider normal. "Ernie's a big fat collared guy that plays the piano. He's a terrific snob and he won't even talk to you unless you're a big shot or a celebrity or something, but he can really play the piano". What Holden says here makes sense on some levels, but no one can say something like that without even knowing the person they are speaking of. Holden's cynical ways of thinking are shown in several ways throughout the novel, mainly through the phoniness he sees in others

The role models学习榜样 The role models seen in both novels are strange in the sense that most people would not seek help from children or slaves, especially during the time periods the two boys lived in. Huck Finn found a sense of hope and security in Jim due to his superstitious behaviour and similar outlook on society. His level of intelligence astounds Huck, and it gives him a new found respect for the African American race. Jim becomes a father figure for Huck. Huck eventually comes to terms with his conscience, freeing Jim out of slavery. He was not just freeing a black slave; he is helping a friend whom he would like to call family. Jim not only helped Huck with his conscience, but he also helped Huck let go of his child-like love for adventure and fantasy in order to gain independence and immaturity Holden Caulfield's role model was his younger sister Phoebe, which is also an unlikely choice for a role model. Phoebe is an intelligent young girl who seems to be the only person that Holden cares to listen to. With Phoebe, he seems to have found the human contact he was looking for.

Nature Nature has the healing power for Huck in his journey into maturity. Holden can not go back to nature for comfort and consolation

The two boys both shared the trait of cynicism towards their societies
The two boys both shared the trait of cynicism towards their societies. They both saw the phoniness and absurdity that corrupts the world that they live in. Alone, these boys think that there is no hope for them; they resort to dreaming about the outcome of the journeys, but both boys receive an entirely different outcome than they anticipated. Both boys have similar world views in the sense that they both lack a parental figure that can help increase their maturity and understanding of the surroundings. Along the way, they both find role models that give them both a sense of security and a feeling of love and compassion that they have been longing for. Through their decision making and growing out of their childlike behavior the two boys both got a step further in the biggest journey of all, life.

Contrast Lies: He is an honest narrator who admits his own faults and weaknesses which created a black cloud that has shadowed him from finding his true place in society. "I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible" (Salinger 16). Out of the two boys Holden appears to be more honest about everything. Huck Finn lies to others when there is no other alternative, but he lies for his own survival rather than out of hatred for society. Holden is a cynic. In contrast, Huck is not as much of a cynic as Holden is, but his level of curiosity is much greater because he has a denser and more positive view on society.

Journey Huck Finn sees the Mississippi as a place of peace and tranquility where he can reflect on his life as well as understand what is wrong with his conscience. Huck enjoys the time spent on the raft; he is free from the "civilizing" that Miss Watson tried to teach him as a child. Travelling down the river, Huck is trying to free Jim out of slavery. Eventually, both Huck and Jim are free without even realizing it. The trip was a way for Huck to gain a new perspective on the world as well as a new respect for a race that is stereotyped because of skin color. Holden Caulfield is on a different sort of journey. He returns to Manhattan and is not allowed to go home. His journey takes place within Manhattan where he goes to all his favourite places and describes them in regards to how they change frequently or do not change at all. He has learnt many things that an adolescent needs to know, but he hasn't mastered enough courage to make a transition from adolescence into adulthood. His transition will be complete when he learns how to help the children through their own struggles as an adult would.

setting The setting of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is filled with injustices, and violence. There were serious issues with slavery, fraud, and gangs throughout Huck's journey down the Mississippi. The setting of Huck Finn brings out a side to him that shows his maturity and respect towards people, and world issues. When he sees the king and the duke, he appears to think of them as phonies without directly stating it. There fraudulent behavior is the cause for that trail of thought for Huck. At the same time, he feels bad for them when he sees them suffer for their acts. The Catcher in the Rye does not deal with issues of this magnitude, but Holden makes the reader believe that the world is unjust for several reasons. Holden sees several problems in his world such as the film industry, how women are perceived by the average male, and the ways people react to him.

Holden Caulfield Holden and the Rest of the World
Holden is everybody's favorite judgmental cynic. He also has a bit of a problem: he's completely alone and he knows it – we stopped count at about 22 when we tried to track the number of times he admits to being lonely. The clear conflict here is that he judges and hates everyone, but at the same time wants them to join him for a drink and chat it up for the evening. He seems perpetually caught in this very limbo: judging a person, making a half-hearted attempt to reach out, and then being disappointed when that person isn't there to support him, talk with him, or try to understand him. Often, Holden can't even get to the point of reaching out at all. His passivity and indecision take over at key moments. Check out the very first thing he does when he gets off the train in New York City – he goes into a phone booth. He knows he wants to call someone, but proceeds to veto all of his options: D.B. is in Hollywood, Phoebe is sleeping, he "doesn't feel like" calling Jane's mother, he's afraid Sally's mom will pick up at her house, and he "doesn't like" Carl Luce. Holden steps out of the phone booth after twenty minutes, having not called anyone. This is the story of his life. Or at least the story of The Catcher in the Rye. When Holden does end up interacting with people, he usually gets the short end of the stick. He invites Ackley along to the movies, but Ackley won't return the favor by letting Holden sleep in his roommate's bed. He writes Stradlater's composition for him, and in return gets yelled at (and socked in the nose, but technically that was for different reasons). He even had to type that essay on a junky old typewriter because he had lent his own to the guy down the hall. He gives up his hound's-tooth jacket for the night, knowing it'll get stretched out in the shoulders. He gets stuck with the tab for the three "moronic" girls' drinks in the Lavender Room at his hotel. He pays Sunny even though he doesn't have sex with her, and ends up getting cheated out of five more dollars (and socked in the stomach, although technically this, too, was for different reasons). Despite all this instances, Holden never makes himself out to be a victim. He doesn't seem to notice that he gets taken advantage of – repeatedly. This is part of his own youth and naïveté. Despite his judgmental exterior, Holden is surprisingly eager to please – and to make friends.

Holden and the Phonies OK, but how can Holden be enthusiastic about meeting people when he deems everyone and their mother (literally – he encounters quite a few mothers in this story) to be phony? In his mind, everyone is a social-climber, a name-dropper, appearance-obsessed, a secret slob, a private flit, or a suck-up. Holden finds any semblance of normal adult life to be "phony." He doesn't want to grow up and get a job and play golf and drink martinis and go to an office. and he certainly doesn't want anything to do with the "bastards" that do. Except that, really, he sort of does. So what's the catch? Basically, if Holden calls everyone a phony, he can feel better when they reject him. It's not his fault the three girls in the Lavender Room weren't terribly interested in giving him the time of day; they were just phonies who couldn't carry on a conversation. He can't feel bad if Ackley doesn't want to let him stay and chat; Ackley's just a pimply moron. If Stradlater doesn't want to hang out, it's because he's a jerk. We prefer not to use tired, old terms like "defense mechanism," but we're certainly tempted to in this case.

约翰·厄普代克（John Uptike,1932——

“兔子”系列小说《兔子，跑吧》（Rabbit, Run,1960）《兔子，回家了》（Rabbit Redeaux,1971）
《兔子，富了》（Rabbit Is Rich,1981）《兔子，休息了》（Rabbit at Rest,1990）

Character Analysis Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom哈里·安斯特罗普
Twenty six year old Rabbit is six foot three, smart, talented, athletic, sexy, and has the gift of gab. He’s environmentally conscious, too – with the walking and running instead of driving and tending Mrs. Smith’s garden. He’s kind of a free spirit. Janice, his pregnant wife, and his son Nelson. It’s just that Rabbit is still a kid himself. Or, more precisely, like most of us – he’s trying to grow up and stay a kid. At least he wants to bring the best of his pre-adult life up into adulthood with him.

Rabbit, Run Narrator: Third Person (Limited Omniscient)

Sammy - The narrator. Sammy is a nineteen-year-old boy working the checkout line at an A&P in a small New England town. When three girls come into the store wearing only bathing suits and are chastised by the store manager, Sammy quits his job, hoping to impress them, and is then filled with foreboding about the future.

Setting March through June, 1959 in Brewer, Pennsylvania and its suburb, Mt. Judge.

Writing Style External. Internal.
Sentences and paragraphs are precision instruments in Rabbit, Run. When he starts running the sentences are short and provide small chunks of information. The first paragraph is short. Then the next paragraph is longer and the sentences get longer as Rabbit gets warmed up. The sentence length tapers of again as he’s nearing his destination, and running out of breath. The style is fluid – it moves and breathes. When nervous or excited, Updike’s characters tend to lose commas from their speech. And when exceptionally strained or dreaming, their thoughts are narrated in run on sentences and other grammatical errors – slips that reveal their inner states.

Tone Sympathetic Many characters in Rabbit, Run say, do, and think harsh things. But a tone of sympathy, and even love pervades. And man are these folks judgmental. Like when Rabbit calls Janice stupid, or when he calls himself a criminal. The tough talking narrator, though it seems to call for a complete overhaul of social norms, also seems to suggest that we are all just people, and people make mistakes. When we are able to identify with flawed or disliked characters, we can sometimes gain real introspection, as well as a deeper understanding of those around us.

Rabbit, Run Theme of Sex Rabbit, Run devotes much attention to sex, and sex’s sometime counterparts, reproduction and/or marriage. Delicate issues (really delicate in 1959, when the novel is set) like prostitution, male and female orgasms, alcoholism, adultery, oral sex, spousal rape, homosexuality (though only briefly and ambiguously), birth control, sex before marriage, single motherhood, divorce, and abortion are explored. Sex in Rabbit, Run can be tender and loving and mutual, or fraught with anxiety and confusion, and often somewhere in between. It can be a healing act, or a weapon. It can be loving, or utterly selfish. Rabbit, Run explores these delicate sexual issues against the repressive backdrop of America in 1959.

Theme of Fear Fear pervades Rabbit, Run, though the novel does provide moments of relief. The main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom thinks he’s caught in a contracting and expanding "trap," or "web," or "net." He runs to counteract the fear this trap produces, though he’s usually running, literally, in circles. Fear drives Rabbit to run, and to be still – to leave, but to always return. He’s afraid the trap he’s stuck in is the trap of mediocrity; he’s sure something better awaits him. So he runs. Yet, he has obligations to others, and he fears that abandoning them makes him a bad man. So he goes back and forth. And back and forth, until his final run at the end of the novel

Theme of Religion Rabbit, Run is suffused with religious questioning. Much of the religious debate in the novel relates to variations of Christian philosophy, but Freudianism (treated something like a religion), atheism, and a brief appearance, or rather, disappearance of the Dalai Lama provide interesting contrasts. Some of these perspectives are pretty risky for the McCarthy-ist and Red Scare era 1959 that provides the backdrop for Rabbit, Run. The drowning death of a newborn baby challenges the religious beliefs of many of the characters, and even provokes her father to dream of founding a new religion, based on "the truth" about life and death. The end of the novel does not tell us if he fulfills the dream’s prophecy.

Theme of Identity Rabbit, Run explores the ways in which individual needs and desires, responsibility, family, religion, pop culture, and The American Dream circa 1959 impact the identities of its characters. The tension between American pioneerism and American conformity results in an identity crisis for the novel’s main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as he runs back and forth between them trying to escape an all pervasive "trap." The results can be both stunningly beautiful and utterly shattering. The open ending leaves it to our imagination (unless we read the sequel, Rabbit, Redux) as to what extent the characters’ identities are, or aren’t, changed by the drowning death of Rabbit’s newborn daughter.

Theme of Visions of America
Rabbit, Run’s author, John Updike says that looking at 1950s America through the eyes of his main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom opened his eyes to the decade. The novel mostly focuses on February, March, and June of 1959 (though the rest of the decade is seen through memory), and on Brewer, Pennsylvania and its suburb, Mt. Judge. The view can be breathtaking in terms of natural beauty. The novel’s landscape is rich in mountains and virgin forests and lush gardens. It can also be cramped and suffocating when we find the characters where they live, and where TV characters show them what the American Dream is supposed to look like. Rabbit, Run’s vision of America asks us to interrogate our own visions of America by exploring America in 1959.

Drugs and Alcohol John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, published in 1960, is obsessed with alcohol and cigarettes. But unless you count delivery room anesthetics, drugs are only mentioned on the first page – some basketball playing kids are smoking weed – almost like Updike, writing about 1959, is predicting the ’60s and ’70s to come. Alcohol is mostly presented as a destructive force; whenever the characters get near it, disaster on small or large-scale results. Cigarettes too are presented as mostly destructive, contributing subtly and not so subtly to the smokers’ problems. Though at one moment a cigarette is seen as "a wafer of repentance." So go steal the keys to the liquor cabinet and – oh, you know Shmoop’s just kidding!

Theme of Transience Rabbit, Run’s main character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is in a perpetual state of transience. He’s always on the move, usually on foot, though he’s occasionally found in a motor vehicle. He only stops to sleep and mate, and occasionally, to grab a bite to eat. Why does he run so hard? Because he thinks something better than what he has is waiting for him. At the same time he’s afraid of deserting the people he cares about. He runs back and forth trying to find some kind of balance. Rabbit, Run challenges us to wonder if we are settling for mediocrity when sitting still, or risking everything when we make a move.

Theme of Guilt and Blame
Rabbit, Run is a guilt and blame-fest. This starts at the beginning of the novel when the main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, runs away from his pregnant wife and his son. But when newborn Rebecca June Angstrom drowns in a bathtub, things get messy. Rabbit’s wife Janice admits she drowned the baby while drunk. Yet Rabbit is a prime suspect, especially to himself. He is a suspect precisely because he was not there when the baby died. All of the other characters in the novel are suspects too – everybody simultaneously feels guilty and wants to blame others. Even the novel’s setting, America of 1959, is a suspect.

Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory
Water Water shows up repeatedly in Rabbit, Run and Updike really works it. When Rabbit first runs, he wants to go to the ocean. Here water takes on the classic meaning: rebirth. In Rabbit’s happy memory of waiting to leave Kroll’s department store with Janice (before they were married), they are bathed in green, underwater light. This is still rebirth – rebirth through union with another. But, as the novel progresses, water takes on more sinister connotations. When Ruth is swimming before they fight, Rabbit sees the chlorinated pool as the essence of cleanliness, but then we find out he associates being wet with being cold, and cold is something he doesn’t like. (Remember when he dreams about that scary block of ice with veins the first night he sleeps at Ruth’s?) Then they fight and Ruth cries, and water is a symbol of sadness. When Rabbit is waiting for Rebecca June to be born he feels like he’s being held underwater by chains made from his own sperm. When Rebecca June drowns, the symbol of water has undergone a complete reversal: from rebirth and cleanliness to death and dirt. In the case of Eccles, water becomes a symbol of his ambivalence about his work. When he’s making all those awkward calls that day, he gets thirstier and thirstier. Even when somebody finally gives him some water, it doesn’t help. But when he goes to the soda fountain where he feels comfortable, we get the idea his thirst is quenched. There, stripped of the formality of his work, he really enjoys talking to teenagers about sex and Jesus. At the end of the novel, even though it’s summer, Rabbit says he needs to move on to the "next patch of snow." Maybe this suggests he’s gotten over his fear of being in the water, of being cold, and of the ice. Or that he feels strong enough to deal with the coldness in the world.

The Mickey Mouse Club, The MagiPeel Peeler, The Used Car Lot, and Mrs
The Mickey Mouse Club, The MagiPeel Peeler, The Used Car Lot, and Mrs. Smith’s Garden Rabbit watches the Mickey Mouse Club in hopes that MC Jimmie and his "mouseguitar" will teach him to be a better MagiPeel Peeler salesman. To Rabbit, both the Mickey Mouse Club, and the MagiPeel company are symbols of fraud, which he thinks needs to embrace to succeed financially. It’s not clear how he thinks The Mickey Mouse Club is defrauding its audience. The MagiPeel Peeler is easier. There are important nutrients in the skins of fruits and vegetables, but the peeler strips them away in the interest of "economy." Telling people that stripping away the peel will give them more nutrients is fraud. He feels similarly about working Mr. Springer’s used car lot – where he has to defraud the customer to make a sale. When Janice’s father calls her when Rabbit doesn’t show up for work, she thinks she can sell her father the line that Rabbit hasn’t run out again by using the car lot talk she learned from him. Her father likewise relies on his salesmanship to deal with every problem – even Rebecca June’s death. He uses the fact that he owns a car lot to try to control Rabbit – he gives him a job, and keeps tabs on him that way. How does Mrs. Smith’s garden fit in? Isn’t that where Rabbit is finally happy with his job? Yes, but Mrs. Smith thinks her flowers are a waste of the field – as the peeler strips the vegetables of nutrients, the flowers strip the land of it’s potential to nourish the hungry, fraudulent in the beauty that Rabbit finds nourishing. He just can’t win.

The Sun and the Moon In the opening lines of the Mrs. Smith’s garden chapter, the sun and the moon are used in a traditional manner, to represent natural harmony, a natural passage of time. Sounds simple enough, but Updike takes it further. The night before Becky’s funeral, Rabbit dreams he’s in an empty track field (like Mrs. Smith’s garden, but without the flowers), and the phrase "the cowslip swallows the elder" is broadcast from a disembodied voice, kind of like a sports announcer. In the dream he understands that the cowslip is the moon (death) and the elder it’s swallowing, or eclipsing, is the sun (life). He dreams that life and death are all part of a beautiful cycle, and that he must found a new religion to spread this word. The elder and the cowslip are both flowers, so we can connect this back to Mrs. Smith’s garden, too. Since it’s suggested that the field has something to do with sports, we could connect this to Rabbit’s high school basketball career that he’s so nostalgic about. Since the field is empty and possibly represents two times in his life when he was happy with what he is doing, and since he’s told to leave the field to start a new religion, the dream could mean that he’s ready to let go of his attachment to things that only partially satisfy him, and to reach for a higher goal. When he wakes from the dream, it no longer makes sense. He lacks a way to apply it to his life. We don’t necessarily see fulfillment of the dream prophecy by the end of the novel, unless you consider his running off again "founding a new religion." But hey, maybe we can. Maybe he’s starting a religion of running. Or maybe that’s a bit of a stretch.

The Trap For Rabbit, anything can symbolize a trap – a road, a map, sperm, a job, an invitation, his apartment. Sometimes the trap is symbolized by something vague he smells in the air. For the readers the trap is a symbol of both Rabbit’s paranoia, and his very real fear that he and Janice are not good for each other. In the beginning of the novel Nelson is part of the trap, but by the end this has changed and Nelson becomes an authority and a source of purpose for Rabbit. The Scale At the end of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit decides that, because Ruth and Janice both have parents that can help her, he can absolve himself of responsibility for them. But Nelson is another matter. Nelson has become the tool by which Rabbit can weigh all his other actions. If Nelson is doing ok, then Rabbit must be doing the right thing. Regardless of what he does, how his actions might affect Nelson will be a major consideration in the future.

William Faulkner American Writer 1897-1962
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 "for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel"

Stream of consciousness novel
A stream of Consciousness Novel attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories and mental images as the character experiences them. Those novels break through the bounds of time and space, and depict vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted迷乱的, distracted and illusory psychology people have when they face reality. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. Action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather and an observer.

Southern writer Set in his native state of Mississippi
Considered one of the most important Southern writers Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams

Major works Yoknapatawpha Saga 约克纳帕塔法世系小说
1 Soldier’s Pay(1925/1926/1927?)《士兵的报酬》 2 Mosquitoes(1927)《蚊群》: 3 Sartoris (1929)《沙多里斯》: the first of Yoknapatawpha saga. 4 The Sound and the Fury (1929)《声音与疯狂》/ 《喧哗与骚动》Compson family The title is from Shakespeare’s Mecbeth(Act V, scene V.) “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing.” 5 As I Lay Dying (1930)《在我弥留之际》: the Bundrens family 6 Sanctuary (1931)《圣殿》 7 Light in August (1932)《八月之光》J.C. (Joe Christmas) 8 Absalom, Absalom! (1936)《押沙龙,押沙龙!》Sutpen family 9 The Hamlet (1940)《小乡村》: the Snopes family是 10 Go Down, Moses (1942)《去吧,摩西》Cellection ,Mccaslin family 11 Intruder in the Dust (1948)《闯入坟墓的人》 12 Requiem for a Nun (1951)《修女挽歌》 13 A Fable (1954)《寓言》 14 The Town (1957)《小镇》 15 The Mansion (1959)《大宅》 16 The Reivers (1962)《劫掠者团伙》Pulitzer prize winning work

Nobel prize in literature
Faulkner said that people must write about things that come from the heart or “universal thruths”, otherwise, the ideas published signify nothing.

Literary significance and criticism
A prominent place among the greatest of American novels,considered as one of the 100 greatest books of all time. The technique of its construction: faulkner’s uncanny ability to recreate the thought patterns of the human mind, even the disabled one An essential development in the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.

Yoknapatawpha county 约克纳帕塔法县 as the setting
Most of his works are set in the American South, an imaginary place based on F’s childhood memory about the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old south/ show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole southern society The Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkner’s real achievement.

The thematic pattern 1. Faulkner exemplified T.S.Eliot’s concept of modern society as a wasteland in a dramatic way. He lamented the decline of the old South and condemned the mechanized, industrialized society. 2. the past and the present, nature and society are always juxtaposed in his works. Almost all of his protagonists turn out to be tragic because they are prisoners of the past, or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personalities.

Almost all his heroes are tragic
They are prisoners of the past or of the society, or of the moral taboos, or of their own personalities Society conditions man with its laws and institutions and eliminates man’s chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence. Man tries to explain the incomprehensible by turning away from reality, but becomes weak, cowardly and confused.

F’s narrative technique
1.withdrwal of the author as a controlling narrator : to him, the primary duty of a writer was to explore and represent the infinite possibilities inherent inhuman life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgment whatsoever and reduce auctorial intrusion to the lowest minimum. let the narrator explain himself. Inner musing of the narrator 2.dislocation of the narrative time, the most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the chorological time. He deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie. 3.the modern Stream-of-consciousness technique and the interior monologue. The SOC technique was frequently and skillfully exploited by Faulkner to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator. And the interior monologue helps him achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness. 4.multiple points of view: the employment of several narrators or narrative points of views to tell a story, thus making the structure of the book somewhat radiative. 5.symbolism, mythological and biblical allusions.

Faulkner’s language His prose, marked by long and embedded sentences, complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns and a variety of “registers” of the English language is very difficult to read. In contrast, F could sound very casual or informal sometimes. He captured the dialects of the Mississippi characters. Most of the symbols and imageries are drawn from nature.

Barn Burning Theme: class conflicts, the influence of fathers, vengeance. Viewed through the 3rd person perspective of a young, impressionable child. It is a prequel to The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, which make up the “Snopes” trilogy.

themes Alienation and loneliness
Faulkner depicts a child, on the verge of moral awareness, who finds himself cut off from the larger social world of which he is growing conscious. Anger and Hatred Abner Snopes is anger embodied, ready to take offense over any interaction with other people, but especially with those whom he sees as his social superiors. Loyalty and Betrayal Abner’s crude psychological stratagem for gaining the complicity of his family in his bizarre way of life is to press his claim of family ties ,of loyalty. Order and disorder Abner Snope’s life, symbolized by his constant removal to new quarters on account of his quarrels with everyone and by the random wretchedness of the family’s meager belongings, is a life of violent disorder.

style Syntax or sentence structure (the most noticeable feature of F’s style) His sentences tend to be long, full of interruptions, but work basically by stringing out seemingly meandering sequences of clauses.

A Rose for Emily William Faulkner

Setting -South -late 1800s, early 1900s -Miss Emily’s house
A creepy old house in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, (approximately) -South -late 1800s, early 1900s -Miss Emily’s house

TONE Conversational, gossipy. Mysterious Bizarre, strange Grotesque
Southern Gothic

Writing style Flashback Foreshadowing

Detailed Study of the Text
Part I the funeral of Miss Emily Grierson. The narrator –we the men attend the funeral out of obligation the women go primarily because no one has been inside Emily’s house for forty years. Emily’s origins -- aristocratic, but both her house and the neighborhood it is in have deteriorated. Emily’s father former mayor of the town left her with nothing when he died prior to her death, the town remitted Emily’s taxes dating from the death of her father. Detailed Study of the Text

Part II flashback Emily is apparently a spinster because of her father’s insistence that “none of the young men were good enough” for her. Emily’s father’s death. Emily is at first in such deep denial she refuses to acknowledge that her father is dead. She finally breaks down after three days and allows the townspeople to remove his body. 3. Emily’s neighbors complain of an awful smell emanating from her home.

4.Miss Emily sat in the window with the light behind her. a dark figure seen against a light background. In this image, she looks like an idol, or a Goddess. her rigid and stubborn personality, her arrogant character.

Part III detail Emily’s developing relationship with Homer Barron, a Yankee construction foreman the ladies and many of the older people in town find Emily’s behavior scandalous. she purchases arsenic(砒霜)from the town’s druggist.

Part IV 2. Homer statements he is not the marrying type.
1. the town believes that Emily may commit suicide 2. Homer statements he is not the marrying type. Emily’s cousins arrived to prevent the scandal. 3. Emily purchases a complete set of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt. --This leads the town to believe that Emily will marry Homer Emily is not seen in town for almost six months. Her house remains closed to visitors o

There they find the rotten corpse of Homer Barron.
Part V Soon after Emily is buried, several of the men force the upstairs open. There they find the rotten corpse of Homer Barron. Even more grotesque, they find a long strand of iron-gray hair on the pillow next to his remains.

A Rose for Emily

What is the grotesque factor in the short story?
Emily kept the dead body of Homer in her bed for 40 years.

Do you think this short story a tragedy?
What is tragic? Who is the hero\heroine? Homer Barron Miss Emily

《上邪》（两汉乐府）上邪！我欲与君相知，长命无绝衰。山无陵，江水为竭，冬雷震震，夏雨雪，天地合，乃敢与君绝！

Why did Miss Emily kill Homer Barron?
Barron refused to marry her.

Emily is psychologically twisted.
Why?

an aristocratic family of the South
Slavery, plantation Born a lady Lived a lady enjoyed a high social status.

Born in a rich family Lived a lady

Emily is actually a victim.

Money Foot-binding the three obediences and four virtues Patriarchal culture

Financially Life Marriage

“The father was standing in the foreground while Miss Emily was standing in the background.”

Emily is the victim of Patriarchal culture the Patriarchal society the father’s dominant position and the daughter’s subordinate role.

The victim of the Old South
Before Civil War: plantation, slavery After Civil War : Southern Ladies, fail to adapt to the change.

the conflicts Mr. Grierson and his daughter
Miss Emily and Homer Barron Miss Emily and the community the South and the North Miss Emily and the established codes of conduct the past and the present.

Symbolism The House—freedom (free for love—a prison), isolation
Emily's hair –time, Iron-gray hair, stubborn Lime石灰 and Arsenic砷 The lime is a symbol of a fruitless attempt to hide something embarrassing, and creepy. It's also a symbol of the way the town, in that generation, did things. Rose-- thorn

(The way the author tells the story.) flash back
STYLE (The way the author tells the story.) flash back We Long, complicated sentences. (See ¶ 1) -interruptions -big, bookish words (coquettish, ¶ 2) Lots of description. (See ¶ 6) Flashbacks. (See ¶ 3) foreshadowing Not much dialog.

theme First short story in 1930 set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha The confrontation of the old south and the civilized modern society. Emily is in collision with the industrialized and mechanized society by clinging to the past and alienating herself from the modern society, which makes her a tragic victim.

characterization Emily, a descendent of the southern aristocracy, typical in F’s Y stories. She depended on her father and clang to his memory by remaining unmarried because of dominance of her father and his rigid ideas about social status. Emily was eccentric in refusing to accept the passage of time or the inevitable social change. Emily demonstrates her deformed personality and abnormality in her relationship with her sweetheart.

Stylistic features The dislocated time sequence\juxtaposing the past with the present The five sections represent five petals of rose The gothic devices\dramatize Emily’s deformed personality and abnormality Symbolism: Emily as “the fallen monument” is the symbol of tradition, the old South and old way of life.

《喧哗与骚动》Sound and the Fury
Setting Yoknapatawpha约克纳帕塔法County, Mississippi, 1928; Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1910

Narrator: First Person, Third Person Omniscient
The Sound and the Fury is actually a four-part novel. Unlike other four-part novels, however, it’s also got four different narrators: Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and the Voice in the Sky. Actually, the Voice in the Sky is just what we’re calling the omniscient narrator of the final section. Critics tend to refer to this section as Dilsey’s section, because it follows her actions the most closely, but the narrative voice just isn’t Dilsey’s own.

Character Quentin Compson 昆丁康普生 - The oldest of the Compson children and the narrator of the novel’s second chapter. A sensitive and intelligent boy, Quentin is preoccupied with his love for his sister Caddy and his notion of the Compson family’s honor. He commits suicide by drowning himself just before the end of his first year at Harvard.

Caddy Compson凯蒂 --The second oldest of the Compson children and the only daughter. Actually named Candace, Caddy is very close to her brother Quentin. She becomes promiscuous, gets pregnant out of wedlock, and eventually marries and divorces Herbert Head in 1910. Jason Compson杰生 IV --The second youngest of the Compson children and the narrator of the novel’s third chapter. Jason is mean-spirited, petty, and very cynical.

Benjy Compson班吉 - The youngest of the Compson children and narrator of the novel’s first chapter. Born Maury Compson, his name is changed to Benjamin in 1900, when he is discovered to be severely mentally retarded.

Writing Style Ridiculously Complicated

Themes The Corruption of Southern Aristocratic Values
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a number of prominent Southern families such as the Compsons. These aristocratic families espoused traditional Southern values. Men were expected to act like gentlemen, displaying courage, moral strength, perseverance, and chivalry in defense of the honor of their family name. Women were expected to be models of feminine purity, grace, and virginity until it came time for them to provide children to inherit the family legacy. Faith in God and profound concern for preserving the family reputation provided the grounding for these beliefs.

The Civil War and Reconstruction devastated many of these once-great Southern families economically, socially, and psychologically. Faulkner contends that in the process, the Compsons, and other similar Southern families, lost touch with the reality of the world around them and became lost in a haze of self-absorption. This self-absorption corrupted the core values these families once held dear and left the newer generations completely unequipped to deal with the realities of the modern world. We see this corruption running rampant in the Compson family. Mr. Compson has a vague notion of family honor—something he passes on to Quentin—but is mired in his alcoholism and maintains a fatalistic belief that he cannot control the events that befall his family. Mrs. Compson is just as self-absorbed, wallowing in hypochondria and self-pity and remaining emotionally distant from her children. Quentin’s obsession with old Southern morality renders him paralyzed and unable to move past his family’s sins. Caddy tramples on the Southern notion of feminine purity and indulges in promiscuity, as does her daughter. Jason wastes his cleverness on self-pity and greed, striving constantly for personal gain but with no higher aspirations. Benjy commits no real sins, but the Compsons’ decline is physically manifested through his retardation and his inability to differentiate between morality and immorality. The Compsons’ corruption of Southern values results in a household that is completely devoid of love, the force that once held the family together. Both parents are distant and ineffective. Caddy, the only child who shows an ability to love, is eventually disowned. Though Quentin loves Caddy, his love is neurotic, obsessive, and overprotective. None of the men experience any true romantic love, and are thus unable to marry and carry on the family name. At the conclusion of the novel, Dilsey is the only loving member of the household, the only character who maintains her values without the corrupting influence of self-absorption. She thus comes to represent a hope for the renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and positive form. The novel ends with Dilsey as the torchbearer for these values, and, as such, the only hope for the preservation of the Compson legacy. Faulkner implies that the problem is not necessarily the values of the old South, but the fact that these values were corrupted by families such as the Compsons and must be recaptured for any Southern greatness to return.

Resurrection and Renewal
Three of the novel’s four sections take place on or around Easter, Faulkner’s placement of the novel’s climax on this weekend is significant, as the weekend is associated with Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday. A number of symbolic events in the novel could be likened to the death of Christ: Quentin’s death, Mr. Compson’s death, Caddy’s loss of virginity, or the decline of the Compson family in general.

Some critics have characterized Benjy as a Christ figure, as Benjy was born on Holy Saturday and is currently thirty-three, the same age as Christ at the crucifixion. Interpreting Benjy as a Christ figure has a variety of possible implications. Benjy may represent the impotence of Christ in the modern world and the need for a new Christ figure to emerge. Alternatively, Faulkner may be implying that the modern world has failed to recognize Christ in its own midst. Though the Easter weekend is associated with death, it also brings the hope of renewal and resurrection. Though the Compson family has fallen, Dilsey represents a source of hope. Dilsey is herself somewhat of a Christ figure. A literal parallel to the suffering servant of the Bible, Dilsey has endured Christlike hardship throughout her long life of service to the disintegrating Compson family. She has constantly tolerated Mrs. Compson’s self-pity, Jason’s cruelty, and Benjy’s frustrating incapacity. While the Compsons crumble around her, Dilsey emerges as the only character who has successfully resurrected the values that the Compsons have long abandoned—hard work, endurance, love of family, and religious faith.

Symbols Water Water symbolizes cleansing and purity throughout the novel, especially in relation to Caddy. Playing in the stream as a child, Caddy seems to epitomize purity and innocence. However, she muddies her underclothes, which foreshadows Caddy’s later promiscuity. Benjy gets upset when he first smells Caddy wearing perfume. Still a virgin at this point, Caddy washes the perfume off, symbolically washing away her sin. Likewise, she washes her mouth out with soap after Benjy catches her on the swing with Charlie. Once Caddy loses her virginity, she knows that no amount of water or washing can cleanse her.

Quentin’s Watch Quentin’s watch is a gift from his father, who hopes that it will alleviate Quentin’s feeling that he must devote so much attention to watching time himself. Quentin is unable to escape his preoccupation with time, with or without the watch. Because the watch once belonged to Mr. Compson, it constantly reminds Quentin of the glorious heritage his family considers so important. The watch’s incessant ticking symbolizes the constant inexorable passage of time. Quentin futilely attempts to escape time by breaking the watch, but it continues to tick even without its hands, haunting him even after he leaves the watch behind in his room.

The Failure of Language and Narrative
Faulkner himself admitted that he could never satisfactorily convey the story of The Sound and the Fury through any single narrative voice. His decision to use four different narrators highlights the subjectivity of each narrative and casts doubt on the ability of language to convey truth or meaning absolutely. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason have vastly different views on the Compson tragedy, but no single perspective seems more valid than the others. As each new angle emerges, more details and questions arise. Even the final section, with its omniscient third-person narrator, does not tie up all of the novel’s loose ends. In interviews, Faulkner lamented the imperfection of the final version of the novel, which he termed his “most splendid failure.” Even with four narrators providing the depth of four different perspectives, Faulkner believed that his language and narrative still fell short.

The opening section of The Sound and the Fury is considered one of the most challenging narratives in modern American literature. What makes this section so challenging? Benjy narrates the first section of the novel. Due to his severe mental retardation, he has no concept of time. This makes his narrative incoherent and frustrating at times because he cannot separate events in the past from those in the present. Benjy can only associate the images of his daily existence, such as the golf course and fencepost, with other occurrences of those images in the past. Benjy’s fusion of past and present explains why he still haunts the front yard waiting for Caddy to come home from school—he does not understand that Caddy has grown up, moved away, and will never return. Benjy’s distorted perspective conveys Faulkner’s idea that the past lives on to haunt the present. Benjy’s condition allows Faulkner to introduce the Compsons’ struggle to reconcile their present with a past they cannot escape. This unique narrative voice provides an unbiased introduction to Quentin’s equally difficult section, in which Quentin struggles with his own distorted vision of a past that eventually overwhelms and destroys him.

Shortly after The Sound and the Fury was published, the noted critic Clifton Fadiman dismissed the novel, claiming that its themes were too “trivial” to deserve the elaborate craftsmanship Faulkner lavished on them. Many other critics have countered that the novel’s themes extend beyond the story of the Compson family specifically, and grapple with issues central to human life in general. In what way might the themes of the novel extend beyond the story of the Compsons’ decline?

Although the plot of The Sound and the Fury is rather vague, the novel demands a broader consideration of the history of the South and the extended aftermath of the Civil War. The novel is set in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, but many of the issues facing its characters involve old-fashioned, outdated traditions and codes of conduct that are vestiges of the days before the Civil War. To appreciate the novel’s themes, we must view the events in the Compson household as a microcosm of a succession of events resulting, more or less, from the South’s defeat in the Civil War. In many of his novels, Faulkner focuses on this ultimate decline of the Southern aristocracy since the Civil War. As the Compsons belong to this aristocracy, The Sound and the Fury portrays their inevitable demise. The members of the family—especially Mrs. Compson and Quentin—fade away because they lead their lives according to outdated Southern aristocratic traditions that are incompatible with the more modern, more integrated South of the early twentieth century. The Compsons are guilty of living in the past and, like many Southern aristocratic families, they pay the ultimate price of seeing their legacy gradually dissolved by the onset of modernity.

Faulkner has said that the character of Caddy was his “heart’s darling”—her character inspired him to write the novel. Why is Caddy driven to pitfalls like promiscuity? What do you make of Mr. Compson’s explanation that virginity is an ideal invented by men, which is utterly irrelevant to women? Caddy is at the center of most of the problems plaguing the Compson children. Quentin is obsessed with her. Jason is vindictive toward her and jealous of her. Benjy is utterly reliant on her comforting presence. Indeed, despite her young age, Caddy serves as a central force that holds the disparate members of the family together. This loving, unifying presence becomes the root of Caddy’s and the Compsons’ demise. When Caddy’s husband discovers that she is pregnant by another man, he divorces her, setting off a chain of events that ultimately ruins the family. First, Jason loses the job Caddy’s husband had promised him. Jason resents Caddy so much that he blames Caddy and her illegitimate daughter for all of his own problems. His resentment builds into a hatred that haunts him relentlessly, undermining every other opportunity that arises. Quentin’s obsession with Caddy drives him to suicide after she loses her virginity. Mr. Compson foresees the danger in Quentin’s obsession long before it pushes his son to suicide. He tries to calm Quentin by explaining that virginity is just a tradition and code of the old South, and that it ultimately only matters to men who take those traditions and codes too seriously. In a sense, Mr. Compson’s insight provides a refreshing alternative to the strict adherence to past traditions that the rest of the Compson family follows. Any hope, however, that Mr. Compson’s advice might lead to a turnaround in his son’s obsession vanishes with Quentin’s suicide, which devastates Mr. Compson and likely contributes to his death from alcoholism not long thereafter. The cold, selfish, compassionless Jason IV rises up to run the family, which eventually leads to the Compsons’ demise.

Compare and contrast the way the main character’s acceptance of death
In Whitman's song of myself, death holds no terrors for the narrator. In Sherwood Anderson’s short story Death in the Woods, the old lady Mrs. Grimes, lives on the edge of society and is looked down on by others because her husband is considered to be a horse thief. Her daughter died in young age. her son grew up like his father, and both of the two men treated the old lady badly. On the last day of her life, she walks into town to trade some eggs and by some meager supplies. On her way home, she leaves the road and begins walking through the woods for a shortcut. On this shortcut she comes to a clearing where she sits down to rest. While sitting down, she is dead. The old lady dies softly and quietly. Perhaps because she has lost interest in living in this unhappy world, she is calm and comfort toward death. Quentin, the oldest of the Compson children in The Sound and the Fury, chooses death as an escape and relief. He feels a burden of responsibility to live up to the families’ past greatness and prestige. When he finds that his sister and father have disregarded the code that gives order and meaning to his life, he is driven to despair and eventually committed suicide. Thus, death to Quentin is rather a happy and comforting thing than a dreadful one.

Faulkner’s description of Dilsey
Faulkner’s description of Dilsey. List the features of Faulkner’s style present in this description Faulkners is a master of his own particular style of writing. From the marvelous description in the above lines narrated by an omnificent narrator, a work-worn old woman figure vividly appears before our eyes. Marked by long and embedded sentences, complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns and a variety of “registers” of the English language, the paragraph is very difficult to read. The sentence in this paragraph is rather long and hypnotic with 109 words. Faulkner sometimes withholds important details, or refers to people or events that the reader will not learn about until much later. For instance, the complimentary words “courage”, “fortitude” and “indomitable” are not only intended to depict Dilsey’s appearance, but also indicate her personality. What’s more, the author is good at using unusual similes such as “rising like a ruin or a landmark the somnolent and impervious guts”.

福克纳在西方现代文学中的重要性一、他描绘了一幅复杂的美国南方社会的图景，表现了二百年来美国南方社会的变迁。各阶级阶层人物的浮沉起落，各种人物的命运与精神面貌，都在这幅图景里得到反映——尽管有时是扭曲的、主观色彩很浓的反映。在描给这幅图景时，福克纳塑造了一系列典型人物的形象。二、他一方面描绘南方，同时又表明了二十世纪“现代人”（应该说是西方的中产阶级及其知识分子）所关切的重大问题。如个人与社会的关系、罪恶与赎罪问题、历史负担与如何对付这一负担的问题、金钱与文明的污染与如何保持自身良心的纯洁、精神出路何在等问题。这些都是西方许多人关心的问题。福克纳对传统、对物质文明的怀疑否定引起了西方知识分子的共鸣。由于福克纳站在一个敏感的知识分子立场，从根本上说，也就是人道主义和民主主义的立场，对这些问题进行了比较深入细致的探讨。所以，西方知识分子认为福克纳表现出了“同时代的精神”。我们也可以通过福克纳的作品了解西方社会的许多重大问题。三、福克纳在小说的写法上进行了大胆的试验与创新，取得了某些成效。他比乔伊斯更进一步地运用“意识流”手法，在发掘人物的内心活动上，达到一个新的深度。他也试验各种各样的“多角度”叙述方法，给小说增加层次与主体感。此外，他可运用“时序颠倒”、“象征”、“对位”、等手法，使文学作品能充分反映现代生活的复杂性，具有一定的哲理性。同时给作品涂上一层扑朔迷离变幻莫测的神秘色彩。在语言上，他还故意通过运用朦胧、晦涩的文体来取得特殊的艺术效果。总之，福克纳对小说创作进行了认真的试验，提供了一些经验。这种探索对于后人无疑是有参考价值的。

Free verse wasteland Lost generation the Jazz age The Beat Generation

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Free verse wasteland Lost generation the Jazz age The Beat Generation

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Presentation on theme: "Free verse wasteland Lost generation the Jazz age The Beat Generation"— Presentation transcript:

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