浅析海明威的一个干净明亮的地方.docx

A brief analysis of A Clean, Well-lighted Place英语语言文学 刘阳子 201430810130AbstractErnest Hemingway was a well-known writer in the literary world. His distinctively crisp, unadorned style left American literature permanently changed. His short story A Clean, Well-lighted Place is one of the classic works in modern American literary. Hemingway was one member of the Lost Generation which was called by Gertrude Stein. He has extraordinary writing skills which bring him reputation till now. As we all know, “Iceberg Theory” is a trademark in his writing life. Through the brief analysis of this short story, we will get much more information of his mastery of short story writing. 摘要厄内斯特海明威是文学实际一位享誉盛名的作家。他那特殊的、干净直接的、不加修饰的写作技巧给美国文学带来了长远的变化。他的短篇小说一个干净、明亮的地方在现代美国文学当中是经典之一。海明威是“迷惘的一代”的其中一员，这个称呼来自格特鲁德斯泰恩。他拥有独特的写作技巧，这给他带来了知道如今都存在的名望。我们都知道，“冰山理论”是他写作生涯中的标志性的东西。通过对这篇小故事的简单分析，我们能得到更多了解海明威在短篇小说的写作的大师级的技巧。1. The Lost Generation and Ernest HemingwayThe Lost Generation was the generation that came of age duringWorld War I. The term was popularized byErnest Hemingway, who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel,The Sun Also Rises.In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase toGertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron. This generation included distinguished artists such asF. Scott Fitzgerald,T. S. Eliot,John Dos Passos,Waldo Peirce,Isadora Duncan,Abraham Walkowitz,Alan Seeger,Franz Kafka,Erich Maria Remarqueand the composersSergei Prokofiev,Paul Hindemith,George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland.1.1 The Lost GenerationInA Moveable Feast, published after Hemingways and Steins deaths, Hemingway claims that Stein heard the phrase from a garage owner who serviced Steins car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car quickly enough, the garage owner shouted at the boy, You are all a gnration perdue.Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, That is what you are. Thats what you all are. all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.Lostmeans notvanishedbutdisoriented,wandering,directionless a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the wars survivors in the early post-war years.The 1926 publication of Ernest HemingwaysThe Sun Also Risespopularized the term, as Hemingway used it as an epigraph. The novel serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway himself later wrote to his editorMax Perkinsthat the point of the book was not so much about a generation being lost, but that the earth abideth forever; he believed the characters inThe Sun Also Risesmay have been battered but were not lost.In his memoirA Moveable Feast, published after his death, he writes I tried to balance Miss Steins quotation from the garage owner with one fromEcclesiastes. A few lines later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: I thought of Miss Stein andSherwood Andersonand egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of theGreat Depression, though in the United States it is used for thegenerationof young people who came of age during and shortly after World War I, alternatively known as the World War I generation. AuthorsWilliam StraussandNeil Howe, well known fortheir generational theory, define the Lost Generation as the cohorts born from 1883 to 1900, whocame of ageduring World War I and theRoaring Twenties.InEurope, they are mostly known as the Generation of 1914, for the year World War I began.8InFrance, the country in which manyexpatriatessettled, they were sometimes called theGnration au Feu,the Generation in Flames.In Britain the term was originally used for those who died in the war,and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite.Many felt that the flower of youth and the best of the nation had been destroyed, for example such notable casualties as the poetsIsaac Rosenberg,Rupert Brooke,Edward ThomasandWilfred Owen,composer George Butterworthand physicistHenry Moseley.1.2 Ernest Hemingway and the Iceberg theoryErnest Hemingway was born in 1899 from a doctors family. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. And he committed suicide in 1961 in the end. He is one of the most influential writers after the First World War, and readers are vey familiar to his long novels as well as his short novels. His life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics ofAmerican literature.Hemingway was raised inOak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months forThe Kansas City Star, before leaving for theItalian frontto enlist with theWorld WarI ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novelA Farewell to Arms(1929).In 1921, he marriedHadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as aforeign correspondentand fell under the influence of themodernistwriters and artists of the 1920s Lost Generation expatriate community. He published hisfirst novel,The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. After his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway marriedPauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from theSpanish Civil Warwhere he had been a journalist, and after which he wroteFor Whom the Bell Tolls(1940).Martha Gellhornbecame his third wife in 1940; they separated when he metMary Welshin London duringWorld War II. He was present at theNormandy landingsand theliberation of Paris.Shortly after the publication ofThe Old Man and the Sea(1952), Hemingway went onsafarito Africa, where he was almost killed in two successive plane crashes that left him in pain or ill health for much of his remaining life. Hemingway maintained permanent residences inKey West, Florida, (1930s) andCuba(1940s and 1950s), and in 1959, he bought a house inKetchum, Idaho, where he committedsuicidein the summer of 1961.From his writings we can find his unique style, Iceberg Theory, a classic writing style demonstrating “the art that conceals art”. He explained the theory as seven-eighths underwater and one-eight showing before the readers. Anything the writer eliminates and hides from the readers that can strengthen the iceberg. He further explained, “If a writer knows enough about what his writing, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”(Hemingway, 1932, p.192).The ice berg theory is a writing skill related to the art of both words concision and experience concision. It means to make language concise by using the minimum amount of adjectives, metaphors and even the long sentences, and finite words with infinite meanings. Hemingway wants readers to imagine what he hasnt told in the story, and urge the readers to follow the writers thoughts with his own experience an d knowledge. It requires a higher level of recognition from both the reader and the writer.2. A Clean, Well-lighted PlaceThe short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place tells a story among three men. It was in late night, everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. As he was alone and hopeless, he wanted to commit suicide but saved by his niece. He didnt want to leave the cafe until too late so that the two waters in the cafe began to talk about the old man. The story was full of the dialogue and the attitudes toward the old man.2.1 The titleThe title “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” caused the same strong emotional resonance to Americans as the Shakespears words “To be or not to be” caused to the British. It means a refuge for the old people. The old man wanted to find a clean, well-lighted place to have thorough drunk and to disperse his fear. The young man felt confident in his life and ignored the truth of life. The old water was just looking for the order and stayed late in the clean, well-lighted cafe. A Clean Well-lighted Place implies the orderly place where the solitary people can drink with dignity. So, the theme of the story is, human desires for order and meaning in the chaos of reality. The author means that man should face the challenge with dignity, fight the battles with passion though life is meaningless.Hemingway uses 83 paragraphs and 136 sentences to narrate the story. Compared with James Joyce, he is also a master of the art of words which has made him become another elite writer in the world. The words in the story are not only concrete, specific but commonly found and conversational. The sentences here are syntactically short and simple with orderly organization and concise expression. And they are also too colloquial and even ungrammatical. By repeating the image of dark and the word of nada, jointing symbols and characters are presented in the story. Hemingway uses the symbols to help readers to have a better comprehension of what the seven-eighths of the theme underwater that looks like in this story.2.2 The three charactersThree characters in the story are symbols created by the author, they represent different people in different stage in modern society. As we all know, they are all nameless. To be everyone in society, three characters here are vividly shows this. The reader can also feel such feelings as fear and nothingness through their conversation, though no psychological description in the characterization. All of them tend to escape from what they fear in the story. The old waiter who is bachelor fear to be alone in his room, and his insomnia always keeps him awake in the night. He is also a deaf, which in fact keeps him separate from the outside chaos. But this forces the young waiter who feels very uncomfortable to be away from him. However, the young waiter is self-confident but selfish and impatient with the old man who is already drunk. He has a wife, and he wants to go home for his wifes waiting for him. In this sense, he just want to find a shelter to get some peace in his mind, which he cannot find in work. He says a lot, complains all the time. He shows no sympathy for the old man and has no care about the value of peoples existence. His pursuit of material happiness and satisfaction with this way of living is revealed in the story. Lacking of confidence from his external behavior, the young waiter can be read by the reader in the story easily. We can see from what he said“ I have confidence, I am all confident.” This is how the iceberg theory demonstrated in the characterization. Youth and a job are the waiters “confidence” which are as something supreme.But, the young waiters confidence is useless and non-productive. He will become old, the despair and “nothingness” are approaching instead. The older waiter, in contrast, is friendly with those who stay late at the cafe. He is willing to be companied with the old man, because he is also “one of those who like to stay late at the cafe”. He cant fall asleep till dawn and he wants to escape from the darkness, so he always sits up. Here, insomnia is a trivial thing that takes effect. It symbolizes peoples fear of darkness, awareness of lifes meaninglessness and their dread of solitude and death. The old waiter can also recognize the nothingness of his life. Insomnia is an agonizing experience that makes people feel more threatened by the power of death. Unlike the young waiter, the old waiter tends to disagree every social precept. At the end of the story, he said to himself, “it is probably only insomnia, many must have it.” The old man feels life meaningless and spent night in vain by drinking. He is wealthy, but he doesnt feel happiness. He stayed in the darkness all night, though he enjoys and pursues brightness. It is a paradox for him, as he shows fear of being exposed in the brightness. The old man represents the old people and the people wounded in spiritually in the war. His wife has died and he has no child, which strikes his heart ferociously. So he commits suicide which he thinks can make him escape from the torture. The old man believes in neither religion nor social principles. Obviously, the old man bears many resemblances to Hemingway himself.2.3 The contrast between light and darknessLight and shadow are two important elements in the story. The writer aims to make an easier way for the reader to think of the image of death, so he chooses to fix the happening time to the night. The light symbolizes the comfort and the company of others, while the night symbolizes death. It means being alive. The insinuations of “the shadow of the leaves” and “the darkness of night” are fear, loneliness and despair. We can feel the overwhelming nothingness or nada in the story. In the dark which means hopeless, but a beam of light and clearness infer the comfort of the soul. Being differ from the natural light, the light in the cafe is a kind of electric artificial light from the industrial civilization. Peoples acquirement of this kind of light is temporary and incomplete.Also, cafe is a place of modern society. It is a shelter which makes people away from the nature and other people. The so-called modern civilization makes people feel lost like a lonely island in the sea. The writer contrasts the light and dark to show the differences between the old man and the