Rhetorical Analysis of The Furnished Room 《带出租家具的房间》的修辞分析

Contents1. Introduction-41.1Brief Introduction of O.Henry- 41.2 Brief Introduction of The Furnished Room- 41.3 Brief Introduction of Rhetoric- 52 . Rhetorical Analyses-Simile- 53. Rhetorical Analyses -Personification- 74 . Rhetorical Analyses-Oxymoron,Metaphor ,Allusion and Surrealism-8 4.1 Oxymoron- 84.2 Metaphor- 94.3 Allusion- 94.4 Surrealism- 95 . Conclusion- 9 Bibliography- 11Abstract This article mainly analyzes the use of the rhetoric in O.Henrys short story The Furnished Room .From the aspect of rhetoric ,this article analyzes the art characteristics in the short story, and through the method of giving examples, this article expounds the simile, personification, oxymoron, metaphor and allusion used in the short story. This article first to give an brief introduction of the author and content of the short story and also the introduction rhetoric and then to expounds the rhetoric used in the short story detailedly . At last ,this article concludes that The Furnished Room is a worthy of savoring . Key words: O.Henry ; Simile; Personification ; Rhetoric中文摘要 这篇文章主要是分析欧亨利的短篇小说带出租家具的房间的修辞手法的运用。本文从修辞方面分析了这篇短篇小说的艺术特色，并通过举例说明的方法，阐述了这篇短篇小说所运用的明喻，拟人，矛盾修辞法，暗喻以及用典等修辞方法。本文先对带出租家具的房间的作者，内容和修辞方法作了简要的介绍，然后对该片短篇小说所运用的修辞方法一一地详细地进行了阐述。本文最后得出结论，带出租家具的房间是一篇值得细细品味的美文。关键词：欧亨利；明喻；拟人；修辞Rhetorical Analysis about The Furnished Room1. Introduction1.1 Brief Introduction of O.Henry O. Henry was the pen name of American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862June 5, 1910), whose clever use of twist endings in his stories popularized the term O. Henry Ending. O.Henry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and he died in New York on June 5th 1910.His stories are famous for their surprise endings. He was called the American Guy De Maupassant. Both authors wrote twist endings, but O. Henry stories were much more playful and optimistic. Most of O.Henrys stories are set in his own time, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City, and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. His stories are also well known for witty narration. Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henrys work provides one of the best English examples of catching the entire flavor of an age. Whether roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the gentle grifter, or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn of the century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best and least-known work resides in the collection Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy South American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period.1.2 Brief Introduction of The Furnished Room The Furnished Room is perhaps the bleakest of O. Henrys best-known stories. Although the basic ironic plot can be summarized in a sentencea young man commits suicide in the same room where a young woman for whom he has vainly searched killed herselfit is the musty atmosphere of the room and the suggestion that every place bears the traces of the lives that have inhabited it that makes the story so compelling. It is a story of transience, of lives that move through a bleak, indifferent world, leaving only bits of themselves, which the young man uncovers as he searches through drawers and pokes into every corner and crevice of the room looking for something that remains of the woman he seeks. However, all that is left is an illusory sweet familiar smell, which melodramatically becomes the sweet smell of the gas he turns on in despair, as she did only one week previously. Although the fact that the young man ends up in the very same room in which his lost sweetheart took her life is one of the most extreme coincidences in all of O. Henrys fiction, the power of the atmosphere of the story is so strong that readers are willing to accept it.1.3 Brief Introduction of RhetoricRhetoric is the skill of using language in speech or writing in a special way that influences or entertains people .It can be divided into three kinds ,including lexical rhetoric ,syntactical rhetoric and phonetic rhetoric. The lexical rhetoric includes simile, metaphor , metonymy, synecdoche, personification, transferred epithet hypallage, euphemism, hyperbole, understatement, irony, oxymoron, pun, syllepsis, allusion ,and so on. The syntactical rhetoric includes antithesis, parallelism, climax, anticlimax, rhetorical repetition, rhetoric question, periodic sentence, loose sentence, and so on.2. Rhetorical Analysis -Simile2.1 Simile Simile is a figure of speech ,involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind by using the words:like, as, etc. Simile is the most significant artistic feature in this short story.Readers will never forget the housekeepers image, an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers. Then, a ferocious, damned capitalist image incisively and vividly spread before us. What more impressive is the description of the housekeepers voice ,her throat seemed lined with fur. Not only looking like a worm , even her throat is also covered with fur. Through this simile, O Henry showed the greed, selfishness, ruthlessness of the small capitalist , and this toxin has reached deeply into the body of the landlady, which has been to the extent of hopelessness. The people at the time had been completely corroded by the ego thought of capitalism ,which is no doubt to make a mockery of the landlady, and also a powerful irony to the social capitalism. Exactly ,it is because the invasion of the selfishness and greed that lead to the landladys cheating ,just to rent out the room to satisfy her desire of enjoyment. Even so, O Henrys villain doesnt arise the readers hate. On the contrary, through these humorous comedy clown figure, we just appreciate the misfortunes and bitterness of the nobodies. Therefore, it can be called the humor of the comedy and the bitterness of the tragedy.The story was told in an atmosphere of gothic and full of obvious surrealism color,even the similes are covered with the surrealism color. When the young man followed the landlady to come into the room, he stepped on a such a carpet, It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. The young mans feeling of walking on the carpet was gradually deepened, and the carpet was compared to the vegetable,lush lichen, spreading moss ,and organic matter, more and more exaggerated and weird, as if the young man was walking on a large worm, which was disgusting and tiresome . In addition , each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall .Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.Dark, decayed, ghostly, and terrible , such corridor made people think of the location of the disasters that happened. Through these descriptions, O.Henry changed this kind of furnished room into the hell ,and showing us a dirty, dark, dilapidated and eerie room. And then, a series of surreal environment description began from here. The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. This is personification, and also is a simile, hiding the color of eerie. The description of the environment gradually went deep,and the decoration of the internal room like some sort of passwords, which were revealing what had happened in this room ,A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. The mantels chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the rooms marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port-a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. He breathed the breath of the house-a dank savor rather than a smell -a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork. Then, suddenly, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odor of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. Convulsion, horrible, monster, these words play an obvious role in the description of the surreal environment. 3 .Rhetorical Analysis -Personification3.1 Personification Personification is a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are provided with human qualities or are represented as possessing human forms. In other words: giving something a human-like quality or ability to something that is not human.It is a figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object and is usually employed to add vividness to expression. An example is The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare ( William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1807). Another is Death lays his icy hand on kings ( James Shirley, The Glories of Our Blood and State, 1659). Personification has been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in allegory; for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrims Progress (1678) by John Bunyan contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair, Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. In this short story,there are many places using personification . He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. In this sentence,he heard a banjo tinkle with spirit and a cat yowled miserably . The banjo and the cat were given to the human features,creating an atmosphere of sadness,sorrow and miserable.The rich odor clung to him and wrapped him around. The young was so familiar with that odor that the author gave her life to bring happiness and hope to the young man.He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. In this sentence ,the gaslight was singing.as if it was laughing at the young man who lost hope and confidence of seeking for his girlfriend.All in all,the personification is completely used in this paragraph to create different feelings of the young man and the changes in his mind.4 .Rhetorical Analysis -Oxymoron,Metaphor and Allusion4.1 OxymoronOxymoron is a rhetorical figure by which contradictory or incongruous terms are conjoined so as to give point to the statement or expression. Another definition of oxymoron is that it is an expression ,in its superficial or literal meaning self-contradictory or absurd ,but involving a point.A good oxymoron, with its conflicting images or ideas, can bring out the hidden truth or subtle significance in a most impressive, emphatic and concise way. It is useful when things have gone contrary to expectation, belief, desire or assertion, or when our position is opposite to another. The figure used on certain occasion may produce an ironic contrast which shows how something has been misunderstood or mislabeled.In this paragraph,there is an oxymoron:Homeless, they have a hundred homes.This kind of people didnt have real homes,and they just flit from furnished room to furnished room . Therefore, the author said that they were homeless and had a hundred homes. 4.2 MetaphorMetaphor is a figure of speech containing an implied comparison in which a word of phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another.In this paragraph ,the author mentioned the furred throat of the landlady three times. As we can see, the young man hated the landlady ,but what he can do was just to endure it and keep seeking for his girlfriend .4.3 Allusion An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H. Abrams defined allusion as a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary work or passage. There is an allusion when described the subterranean retreat,in one of those subterranean retreats where house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.Here,the place where the worm dieth seldom is the hell ,which was taken from the Bible.4.4 SurrealismSurrealism is a 20th century style and movement in art and literature ,in which images and events that are not connected are put together in a strange or impossible way, like a dream ,to try to express what is happening deep in mind.When the young man and the landlady came into the house, he stepped on a carpet They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. According to the feeling of the young man on the carpet,the carpet was compared to vegetables, lichens, moss and organism,which was more and more exaggerated and absurd, as if the young man was stepped on a large green worm, disgusting and tiresome.“At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.” Dark, gloomy, horrible and foul ,this kind of corridor was just like the place where mysterious thing occurred. Through this description, O.Henry made the furnished room into a hell,showing a dark ,dirty ,strange and dilapidated room scene to us.5. Conclusion The story ends with two old Dickensian landladies prattling over their beer about the death of a young woman in the room the previous week, which the landlady has kept secret because she did not want to lose the young mans rent. As the young man lies dead upstairs, the ending of the story, with its focus on the mendacity of the old women, reinforces the squalor of the room, further suggesting the unfeeling city that has no room for the romanticism of the two lovers. Processing novel ending, is O Henrys most creative contribution, also causes him enjoys the great reputation in American and in the world history of literature. He is good at designing plot theatrically, lays down the foreshadowing, finally appears a beyond expectation result in the ending which makes the reader to feel suddenly sees the light, joy after sorr