美国文学篇章赏析

The Cask of Amontillado

Ironically, the story takes place during the carnival season of madness and merrymaking. Montresor plays on

Fortunato's pride in his wine connoisseurship, asking him to verify whether or not Montresor's recent bargain-price wine purchase is expensive amontillado or ordinary sherry. Fortunato agrees over Montresor's protests that it

would be an imposition and a health danger, since the vaults where the wine is stored are cold, damp and

"encrusted with nitre." Montresor's expressed concern for the other man's well-being is at odds with his true

intentions.

the names of the wines noted throughout the story and their possible symbolism. for example, "medoc" for

fortunato so he can fend off the cold and "de grave" while he is walking to his own grave.

There are four possible reasons why Fortunato volunteered to check if it were really Amontillado.

1) He was drunk. 2) The festival was going on and he was in high spirits. 3) He wanted to prove that he was better

than Luchesi. 4) He was, of course, tricked by Montresor. He put in much exaggeration and falsity into his

'speech' to egg Fortunado into entering the crypt or he would never be able to exact revenge.

"Free Mason refrence" When Montressor was talking about "being" a mason he was probably responding in

scarcasim to Fortunato's question. Montressor cleverly knows that he is detering the attention of his drunkin friend

when he pulls out his trowel (which is a tool for masony).At that point in the conversation it seems that Fortundo

aknowledges he lost the conversation in his intoxication and moves along to the Amontillado.

the abnormal social phenomena exist in the reality,the intrigue among people to gain profits and also the

immoral measures people took for panning gold at the Gold Rush Era.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Plot：The narrator is sent by a friend on an errand to visit an old man, Simon Wheeler, to find an old

acquaintance of his friend, Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator finds Simon at the "decayed mining camp of

Angel's" The narrator asks the fat, bald-headed man of Leonidas. Simon responds that he doesn't know a Leonidas

Smiley, but he knows of a Jim Smiley. From there Simon tells the story of Jim.

Themes: A cultured Easterner relates his recent visit to a talkative old man at a western mining camp. Rather than

providing information that the Easterner is looking for, the old man keeps him waiting while he spins a tale about

a betting man and his pet frog.

Culture Clash: it highlights various aspects of late nineteenth-century American society and culture through the

retelling of a tall tale. Central to the story is the idea of conflicting cultures, particularly the clash between the

settled, eastern portion of the United States and the still-developing West. At the time Twain wrote the story, the

East and its inhabitants had a reputation for being civilized, cultured, and advanced. The West, on the other hand,

was still being settled and was considered to be populated.

Style:

The frame tale structure.

In a frame tale, one story appears in—that is, it is framed by—another story. In

"Jumping Frog" the outer tale focuses on Mark Twain and his meeting with the talkative old storyteller, Simon

Wheeler. This meeting occurs at the request of a friend of Twain's, identified in some versions of the tale as A.

Ward, who supposedly wants to find out about an old acquaintance named Leonidas Smiley. Twain reveals,

however, that he suspects his friend's request was merely a practical joke designed to waste his time. Twain's

suspicions about the meeting and his descriptions of Wheeler appear in the few paragraphs that open and close the

entire story.

幽默艺术的四个特点:用夸张的手法突出幽默对象的本质特征;用漫画的技巧追求幽默艺术的深刻性;运用大量土语和俚语增强幽默效果;巧妙地构思出一些奇特、曲折的故事情节,增强幽默的感染力.

A Clean，Well-Lighted Place

The old man is afraid of the darkness and loneliness, He need cafe's whiskey to encourage himself to live, to

insist. The cafe represents the soul shelter or the rest harbor for the two.

One man's loneliness and isolation from the rest of the world. the younger waiter and the older one are

different. The older one has more xp in the world, so he can understand the old man better. Nothingness is the

keynote of the whole story.

In the end, Hemingway leaves us with an universality to the tale in that: "Many must have it." Not only do

many people have the insomnia and sleeplessness, but they also experience loneliness and the need for a clean,

well-lighted place in which to feel safe, or perhaps insulated.

Some have argued that Hemingway contrasts light and shadow to differentiate the old man and the young

people around him, and uses the deafness of the old man as a symbol for his separation from the rest of the world.

Hemingway uses the waiters to judge the old man and portray his views. As a clean drunk, the man does not spill

a drop as he drinks and walks "unsteadily but with dignity" when he finally leaves the café. The waiters talk

between themselves as the young waiter asks the old waiter the man’s story. He wonders how anyone could sit

alone drinking in the café instead of buying a bottle for himself and drink in the comfort of his own home. It is

then the old waiter who defends the man. The old waiter acknowledges that it is better for the man to have many

drinks in public than any drinks in private.

Another way to analyze the relationships between the men is to compare them as one person. The young

waiter complains about having to stick around the café waiting for the man to finish drinking. He claims that he

has a wife to go home to and he would rather be in bed than in the café. The old waiter defends the drinking man

because he can relate and even see himself in the man. He sympathizes knowing that he, too, prefers a clean well

lighted place to drink and will later appreciate such a place in his old drinking age. The old man is in his final

years of life and the old waiter recognizes that he soon will have the same fate as the old man. A progression of

age is seen among the characters demonstrating the transition from being young and social to aging and feeling

lonely. Hemingway portrays a difference in age, experience, and opinion of drinking through the unique

characters.虚无就是黑暗孤独，无希望、无意义、精神无所寄托的迷惘。

Barn Burning

The story deals with class conflicts, the influence of fathers, and vengeance as viewed through the third-person perspective of a young, impressionable child.

Characters：

•

Colonel Sartoris Snopes ("Sarty") - protagonist

•

Abner Snopes – patriarch of the Snopes family, Antagonist

•

Lennie Snopes – wife of Abner and mother of Sarty

•

Lizzie – unmarried sister of Lennie Snopes

•

Major de Spain - Snopes's employer

Plot summary：

Abner Snopes, the father of young "Sarty" Snopes, is being driven out of town after burning down his

landlord's barn. In the court case that opens the story and in which Sarty is initially called to testify, no palpable

proof can point to Abner as the culprit, but the Snopes family is ordered to leave the county. They move to a new

place where Abner is to work as a sharecropper for Major de Spain, but Abner cannot seem to control his

pyromania and hatred for society.

Shortly after arriving at his new position, Abner visits Major de Spain's house and tracks horse droppings on

a blond rug. Major de Spain orders Abner to clean the rug, which he does by using a harsh lye soap, ruining the

rug beyond repair, before throwing the rug onto Major de Spain's front porch. Major de Spain levies on Abner a

fine of 20 bushels of corn against the price of the rug. At court, a Justice of the Peace reduces the fine to ten

bushels of corn. Feeling once again wronged, Abner makes preparations to set fire to Major de Spain's barn. Sarty

warns Major de Spain of his father's intentions to burn down his barn and then flees in the direction of his father.

He is soon overtaken by Major de Spain on his horse and jumps into the ditch to get out of the way. Sarty hears

two gun shots, but who gets shot is never revealed; the father and the brother appear in works set after "Barn

Burning." Profoundly affected by his father's legacy, the boy does not return to his family but continues on with

his life alone.

Theme: Alienation and Loneliness

In "Barn Burning," 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; this sense of alienation takes root, moreover, in Sarty's

relation with his father, who should be the moral model and means of entry of the child into the larger world.

Because of his father's criminal recklessness, Sarty finds himself, in the first part of the story, the object of an

insult.

The most noticeable feature of is his syntax or sentence structure. Faulkner's sentences tend to be long, full of

interruptions, but work basically by stringing out seemingly meandering sequences of clauses. The second

sentence of "Barn Burning" offers a case in point: It is 116 words long and contains between twelve and sixteen

clauses, depending on how one parses it out; its content is heterogeneous, moving from Sarty's awareness of the

smell of cheese in the general store through the visual impression made by canned goods on the shelves to the

boy's sense of blood loyalty with his accused father. It is the subjectivity of the content—sense impressions,

random emotions and convictions—which reveals the purpose of the syntax.

If family ties constitute a moral obligation on the individual, is there any higher morality which might require

the individual to act against a family member? This is the question that ten-year-old Sarty confronts—and answers.

The Great Gatsby

Theme: Culture Clash. By juxtaposing characters from the West and East in America in The Great Gatsby,

Fitzgerald was making some moral observations about the people who live there. Those in the Midwest—the

newly arrived Nick Carraway—were fair, relatively innocent, unsophisticated, while those who hved in the East

for some time—Tom and Daisy Buchanan—were unfair, corrupt, and materialistic. The Westerners who moved

East, furthennore, brought the violence of the Old West days to their new lives. Fitzgerald romanticizes the

Midwest, since it is where the idealistic Jay Gatz was born and to where the morally enlightened Nick returns. It

serves metaphorically as a condition of the heart, of going home to a moral existence rooted in basic, conservative

values. Further, the houses of East Egg and West Egg represent similar moral differences.

Style: Point of View. The Great Gatsby is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway, one of the main

characters. The technique is similar to that used by British novelist Joseph Conrad, one of Fitzgerald's literary

influences, and shows how Nick feels about the characters. Superbly chosen by the author, Nick is a romantic,

moralist, and judge who gives the reader retrospective flashbacks that fill us in on the life of Gatsby and then flash

forward to foreshadow his tragedy. Nick must be the kind of person whom others trust. Nick undergoes a

transformation himself because of his observations about experiences surrounding the mysterious figure of Jay

Gatsby. Through this first-person ("I") narrative technique, we also gain insight into the author's perspective. Nick

is voicing much of Fitzgerald's own sentiments about life.

Critical Overview:Just before The Great Gatsby was to appear with a publication date of April 10, 1925, the

Fitzgeralds were in the south of France. Fitzgerald was waiting for news from Max Perkins, his publisher, and

cabled him to request "Any News," The 29-year-old author had won critical acclaim for his first novel, This Side

of Paradise but had faltered with the less-than-perfect The Beautiful and the Damned. He was earnest about being

considered one of the top American writers of his time, and needed the boost that his third novel might give him

to achieve that status. During his lifetime, Fitzgerald was generally praised for The Great Gatsby; it is usually

considered to be his finest accomplishment and the one most analyzed by literary critics.

Sonnet - To Science

During the Romantic era poets explored our once infinite world naively, seeing it as devoid of any true

answers, Poe earnestly believes that one must put his faith in nature rather than the scholars or the "vultures".

Poe believes that science is a monster demolishing our true intuitive minds. He stresses the need for room in our

minds for creativity and imagination, but argues it is absent when science dominates our minds.

The poem is a traditional English sonnet,divided into three stanzas and a final couplet,with

rhymes,metaphors and alliteration. In the first stanza,rhymed abab, the poet criticises Science for being a”true

daughter of Old Time”. Poe is lamenting that imagination and creativeness is not permissible by scientists they

only kill the nymphs with the gun of "logic" and materialize the world more and more.

I’m Nobody, Who Are You

本诗是诗人安贫乐道精神的自我表白。诗的第一节似与朋友悄语。第二节进一步向对方发表看法，把大人物比作泥水沼里的蛤蟆，在平直的语言中道出对世态炎凉的讥讽。

The poem is telling us the true feeling of all people. How we are nobodies but actuelly want to be somebody,

wanna be seen by the world. But to be a somebody is not as fancy as it seems to be. And if we still being a nobody,

that is OK, because we are not alone!

the frog is the one who wants to be known by the others, so it couldn’t understand the dash, because it requires

your own interpretation, and if you are someone you will be conditioned by society, so you won't have any

individual interpretation of anything.

Success is counted sweetest

Summary: The speaker says that "those who ne'er succeed" place the highest value on success. (They "count"

it "sweetest".) To understand the value of a nectar, the speaker says, one must feel "sorest need." She says that the

members of the victorious army ("the purple Host / Who took the flag today") are not able to define victory as

well as the defeated, dying man who hears from a distance the music of the victors.

The three stanzas of this poem take the form of iambic trimester. The stanzas here rhyme according to an ABCB

scheme, so that the second and fourth lines in each stanza constitute the stanza's only rhyme.

Commentary: short moral sayings, which appear quite simple but that actually describe complicated moral and

psychological truths. Its first two lines express its homiletic point, the subsequent lines then develop that

axiomatic truth by offering a pair of images that exemplify it: the nectar--a symbol of triumph, luxury, "success"--

can best be comprehended by someone who "needs" it; the defeated, dying man understands victory more clearly

than the victorious army does. The poem exhibits Dickinson's keen awareness of the complicated truths of human

desire, and it shows the beginnings of her terse, compacted style, whereby complicated meanings are compressed

into extremely short phrases.

To make a prairie

Dickinson's tiny poem makes a huge statement about the nature of musing, day-dreaming, or as she puts it,

"revery." This little poem expresses Dickinson’s continuing love affair with the spiritual level of being. “Revery”

means dream, thought, extended concentration on any subject, or even day-dreaming wherein the mind is allowed

to roam free over the landscape of unlimited expansion, but to the speaker in this poem, “revery” is more like

meditation which results in a true vision. The speaker’s power of revery demonstrates an advanced achievement,

far beyond ordinary day-dreaming or cogitation. Ultimately, this speaker is claiming that without any physical

objects at all, the mind of one advanced in the art of revery can produce any object that mind desires.

In a Station of the Metro

in Pond's poem In a Station of the Metro, the face is so lovely that looks like a watery pear flower。This is

imago which descrbe the figures, landscapes or intrapersonal feelings as the misty beauty.

湿漉漉的黑枝条意味着什么？残酷的现实抑或是颓败的生活？经过风雨肆虐后的花瓣，零落，散乱，残忍的残缺，却是一种凄美绝伦的娇艳。他所透露的，是一股力量.

The first line, which is the title, places us in an subway. The second line I see individual faces with the

anticipation or experience of the day displayed upon their faces. I see the beauty of what each individual

contributes to our daily lives and how we as a society rely on one another, even if we are just "faces in the

crowd."The third line I saw the faces of Petals of a flower bringing beauty to an otherwise dismal, wet and dark

existence. Each petal being unique in it's own way giving meaning and purpose to what would be a dark,

depressing world.

《坛子的轶事》为现代自由体诗，不押韵。“我”——坛子轶事的制造者，悄然转变成了旁观者与叙述者。读者对“坛子”的印象，其实都是通过“我”之描述获得的,具有强烈的个人主观意识。当处理诗歌意象时，他更像一个电影摄影师而非画家。读者从各个方向观察到这只坛子，强烈地感受到一种戏剧化的表现。坛子象征了作者心中的艺术想象力，这种主观力量虽然可以赋予自然世界一种新的秩序，却不可脱离现实存在。“它不曾产生鸟雀和树丛,/与田纳西别的事物都不一样。”但有关它的轶闻就发生在田纳西。荒野可以象征一个人长期混乱无绪的精神状态，而坛子就是某种神秘的触动（一个人、一件事物、一幅景象），它突然探进生活，暗中改变了一切。

The Red Wheelbarrow

The poem has a distinct pattern, with alternating lines of two and one stressed syllables. The work seems to

attempt to reach a specific combination of stresses, but purposely misses each time.

The claim that "so much

depends" upon this wheelbarrow is quite accurate. On a farm, a wheelbarrow is used for a number of important

farm chores. Each stanza is shaped like a wheelbarrow. The colors stand out because of their contrast with one

another: the white chickens contrast with the red of the wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow can be seen as important

for it adds beauty to its surroundings.

Spring and All

It is a hybrid work made up of alternating sections of prose and free verse. It might best be understood as a

manifesto of the imagination: the prose passages are a dramatic, energetic, and often cryptic series of statements

about the ways in which language can be renewed such that it does not describe the world, but recreates it. These

passages are interspersed with poems that demonstrate this recreation in both their form and content.

O Captain! My Captain!

an extended metaphor poem，concerning the death of American president Abraham Lincoln. Repeated

metaphorical reference is made to this issue throughout the verse. The "ship" spoken of is intended to represent

the United States of America, while its "fearful trip" recalls the troubles of the American Civil War. The titular

"Captain" is Lincoln himself.

The whole poem contains three stanzas. Each stanza consists of eight lines. The first four lines are all long

and stated sentences. The next four lines are all short and lyric ones. The construction of this poem is like rolling

and surging waves in the sea, which easily brings people to the context of the poem. When we think of the wide

grand sea, we usually and naturally will regard it as the symbol of freedom. Here Whitman used the image of a

captain to indicate Lincoln does have its special meaning. This is also the inner crying of the poet’s heart. At the

end of each stanza, the poet repeated “fallen cold and dead,” which emphasizes the musical effect of poem and

also promotes the sorrow of all American people. It progresses the whole poem to its climax. “cold and dead” is

not just the description of Lincoln. More appropriatedly, it is the feeling of the whole America. Lincoln’s death

had broken their dreams. They had lost their hope. Whitman had eventually had to accept the truth. The whole

America had to accept the truth. They had to continue to achieve what Lincoln had left and what he could not

finished.

One's Self I Sing

According to Whitman he celebrated the average American as well as altogether union and

equality which

differentiates it between stories of the time and of the past. Whitman speaks of

individuality in his first lines of,

“One’s Self I Sing.” The combination of the “one” and the continuing of the “self” throughout the poem can be

translated as, “everyman‘s self”. Continuing with the first two lines, Whitman also speaks of freedom, identity,

and all around brotherhood/sisterhood. The theme changes in the next three lines when he references our spirit

and physical body, our

sexuality, male and female, and our wisdom. The final lines conclude with the idea of

desire, physical strength, potential, and inner strength. Throughout the entire poem there is disagreement, such as,

when the speaker say’s “simple” in the first line, “simple” meaning “not special,” and finishes the first line with

“separate,” followed by the third line of en-masse, or togetherness. As the title is, “One’s Self,” not “Myself”, this

already forms the bond between the reader and writer which again it’s what he is conveying in the poem. The

final line of the poem has the reader caught up in the difference between past

heroes and the now “modern man”

which now is just as powerful if one believes that it so.