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Файл:From a word to an idea. Part 1. Учебное пособие
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"You ought to go to the bunk now and rest some, Jim boy," he said. "Take off
your shoes and stretch out, Jim boy."
He was elbowed out of the way.
"You didn't kill the mule, did you, Jim?"
"The mule dropped dead in the barn," Jim said. "I wasn't nowhere around. It
just dropped dead."
The crowd was pushing harder. The men in front were jammed against the
jail, and the men behind were trying to get within earshot. Those in the middle were
squeezed against each other so tightly they could not move in any direction.
Everyone was talking louder.
Jim's face pressed between the bars and his fingers gripped the iron until the
knuckles were white.
The milling crowd was moving across the street to the vacant lot. Somebody
was shouting. He climbed up on an automobile and began swearing at the top of his
lungs.
A man in the middle of the crowd pushed his way out and went to his
automobile. He got in and drove off alone.
Jim stood holding to the bars and looking through the window. The sheriff
had his back to the crowd, and he was saying something to Jim. Jim did not hear
what he said.
A man on his way to the gin with a load of cotton stopped to find out what the
trouble was. He looked at the crowd in the vacant lot for a moment, and then he
turned around and looked at Jim behind the bars. The shouting across the street was
growing louder.
"What's the trouble, Jim?"
Somebody on the other side of the street came to the wagon. He put his foot
on a spoke in the wagon wheel and looked up at the man on the cotton while he
talked.
"Daughter woke up this morning again saying she was hungry," Jim said.
The sheriff was the only person who heard him.
The man on the load of cotton jumped to the ground, tied the reins to the
wagon wheel, and pushed through the crowd to the car where all the shouting and
swearing was being done. After listening for a while, he came back to the street,
called a Negro who was standing with several other Negroes on the corner, and
handed him the reins. The Negro drove off with the cotton towards the gin, and the
man went back into the crowd.
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Just then the man who had driven off alone in his car came back. He sat for a
moment behind the steering wheel, and then he jumped to the ground. He opened
the rear door and took out a crowbar that was as long as he was tall.
"Pry that jail door open and let Jim out," somebody said. "It ain't right for him
to be in there."
The crowd in the vacant lot was moving again. The man who had been
standing on top of the automobile jumped to the ground, and the men moved
towards the street in the direction of the jail.
The first man to reach it jerked the six-foot crowbar out of the soft earth
where it had been jabbed.
The sheriff backed off.
"Now, take it easy, Jim boy," he said.
He turned and started walking rapidly up the street towards his house.
3.2 Plot and structural composition
3.2.1 An Outline
Plot is a sequence of events in which the characters are involved, the theme
and the idea revealed. Events are made up of episodes, episodes, in their turn, of
smaller action details.
Every plot is an arrangement of meaningful events. No matter how
insignificant or deceptively casual, the events of the story are meant to suggest the
character's morals and motives.
Plot Structure and Literary Time. The events span in time; they make a
sequence of the past, the present and the future. Each single event takes the place of
one that has occurred before so that they all may be figured as forming one straight
line.
Time in the literary work differs from natural, historical time. The narrative
may begin at any moment in the life of the character and end at any other moment,
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which is not necessarily the one which chronologically follows the former. It may
end with the event that preceded those given at the beginning or in the middle of the
narrative. Time in the literary work is called literary or poetic, and its representation
is conditioned by the laws of narrative literature and the work's content [11].
Sometimes a plot follows the chronological order of events. At other times
there are jumps back and forth in time which are called flashbacks and
foreshadowing.
The four structural components of the plot are exposition, complication,
climax and denouement. Exposition contains a short presentation of time, place and
characters of the story. Complication (or story) is a separate incident helping to unfold the action, and might involve thoughts and feelings as well. It represents the
beginning of collision and the collision itself. Climax is a decisive moment on
which the fate of the characters and the final action depend. Denouement means 'the
untying of a knit' which is precisely what happens in this phase. It is the event or
events that bring the action to an end. The interrelation between these components
of a literary text is called composition [11].
Not all stories have a denouement, some stories end right after the climax,
some lack exposition.
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3.2.2 Practical tasks
Task 1. Read the short story by Mike Quin and get ready with the tasks
for discussion and analysis.
1. What is the story about?
2. What is the general atmosphere of the text? How is it sustained?
3. Give the general definition of the text and its type of narration.
4. Dwell upon the composition of the story. Does it contain any
peculiarities? Are the events which happen in the story arranged chronologically? If
not? Why?
5. Who are the main characters in the story? Describe them. Which
method of characterization does the author apply for? Give examples.
6. Why does the author use short and simple sentences in the beginning of
the story? How do they characterize Jonathan Bones?
7. Are there instances of personage’s speech in the story? Give examples.
8. What are the relations between the characters? How are they
expressed? Consider the choice of words and devices.
9. Are the main characters contrasted to each other? If so, how is this
opposition sustained?
10. What does the author mean when he says “For two long years the battle
raged until both men were hanging by a thread over the pit of bankruptcy”? What
devices are used in this sentence?
11. Why does the author describe Ellsworth again in the end of the story?
Are there any changes in him? If so, what can you compare these changes to?
12. The author introduces into the text some paragraphs devoted to the
description of nature. Why?
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13. Is there any effect of defeated expectancy in the story? If there is, how
is it created? Consider the choice of words “doomed and damned” and syntactical
stylistic devices.
14. What is the main idea of the extract? Does the title reflect its main
idea?
SURVIVAL OF THE FINKIEST
Mike Quin
Jonathan Bones was not in business for his health. If you asked him he would
tell you so frankly. His object was to make money, and to do that you had to be just
a little smarter than the next fellow.
Take that fellow across the street. He'd never get anywhere in the business
world. Too much of a dreamer. An easy mark for anyone.
Bones had no use for dreamers. He had fired many of them. They'd never get
any place in this world.
Dark spots on the pavement told him it was beginning to rain. He took the
iron rod from under the counter, went outside and cranked down the awning. The
words «JONATHAN BONES, MERCHANDISE», extended out over the sidewalk
on a canvas flap.
A bit of paper caught his eye. He picked it up, walked to the curb and
carefully dropped it in the gutter.
Across the street his competitor had come out and was also cranking down the
awning. The words, «ELLSWORTH SPOTTS, MERCHANDISE», moved slowly
downward, like a cannon maneuvering into position.
Damn that man! For two years now the bitter contest had gone on. There was
no room for two merchandise stores. One was all the neighborhood could support.
Which would prove himself the better business man of the two? Which one would
succeed in bankrupting the other?
Jonathan Bones was the first to cut his staff down to three clerks and make up
the difference by increasing their hours. That enabled him to run special sales every
week.
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Ellsworth Spotts was quick to imitate the special sales and even went one
better by running ads in the neighborhood paper. It was a bold answer to the
challenge, but costly. The heavier overhead was a drag on competition. Within three
months, he too had to cut his staff down to three.
Stout, good natured and inclined to pal with his employees, Ellsworth Spotts
took this hard. Bones was right. He wasn't much of a business man — too
emotional. It took him three days to screw up courage for the firing and then he
went out and got drunk.
Bones was not long in finding this out, and he knew he had his competitor on
the run. It was time for another push.
Young men and women who live at home need little money. Anxious to get a
start in the world, they are glad for a chance to learn some business. An ad in the
paper brought twenty smiling and pleading for a chance.
Soon the three old clerks were gone and their places filled by youngsters at
very trivial pay. Two of them took it all right, if a little sadly. But the third stood in
front of the door and called him every dirty name in the book.
«It only goes to show», Bones remarked later, «how easily you can be fooled
on a man's character and how careful you have to be. That man was with me for a
year and a half and in all that while I never suspected he was such a bad actor».
The youngsters caught on very rapidly. They were very intelligent. He
showed them which was the good merchandise and which were worthless items he
had been stuck with. The good merchandise they didn't have to bother about. That
would sell itself in due time. It was the bad items they must get rid of. Greet the
customers with a smile, win their confidence by your pleasing personality, make
them feel you are a friend whom they can trust, then lead them to the rotten
merchandise. Tell them it is very good value and try to take their money away from
them in exchange for it. That was the gist of Bones' training.
Ellsworth Spotts was soon taking the bumps. Everytime he looked across the
street his competitor's store was blazing with sale banners. One after another he was
forced to fire his clerks and replace them with young girls. He got used to firing
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people and soon thought nothing of it. He was obliged to extend the closing hour to
9 o'clock at night and stay open Saturday until midnight.
For two long years the battle raged until both men were hanging by a thread
over the pit of bankruptcy. Ellsworth had lost weight and much of his good nature
vanished with it. His face had a tired, haggard look and a trace of meanness was
beginning to appear on it.
As he finished cranking down his awning, he turned and looked across the
street at where Jonathan Bones was still standing. The sky had clouded, the street
was gloomy and the rain was coming down now in full volume.
There they stood; each under his own awning, gazing across the melancholy
street in mutual hatred — and both of them doomed and damned. For little did they
realize that the lot on the corner had been purchased that morning by Jones and
Hardbottom, Inc., the largest chain store, cut-rate merchandise firm in the country.
3.3 Narrative-compositional forms
3.3.1 An Outline
The author’s speech in a literary text is realized in three narrative
compositional forms traditionally analyzed in poetics and stylistics.
They are: narrative proper where the unfolding of the plot is concentrated.
This is the most dynamic compositional form of the text. Two other forms –
description and essay are static.
The description usually includes landscape and a portrait. The portrait plays a
great role in individualizing a personage, because it supplies not only the details of
the appearance of people, but also the information about his haircut, clothes,
manners, that reflects his habits and tastes. The portrait defines a personage’s social
status, the place and time of action. There is a dynamic portrait when the whole
story is based on the description of a personage’s life (including information about
his appearance and his traits of character), the chief peculiarity of a dynamic portrait
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is that the author uses both methods of characterization and the reader should
imagine this personage himself.
Essay contains causes and effects of the personage's behaviour, his (or the
author's) considerations about moral, ethical, ideological and other issues.
It is rather seldom that any of these compositional forms is used in a “pure”,
uninterrupted way. As a rule they intermingle even within the boundaries of a
paragraph.
3.3.2 Practical tasks
Task 1. State the type of narrative compositional form of the extracts
given below. Pay attention to the language means used in each one which the
author resorts to.
1. Sibyl roused to sounds of panic. Screams, crashes, running footsteps...
Above those sounds was an awesome, earthshaking noise. Vesuvius. She tried to
move, then groaned, instead. Nothing seemed to be working properly and she was
mortally certain she did not want to try moving again. Sibyl tried to move, anyway.
She had to get out of the house before the real eruption started. The steam
explosions had already begun. Which meant the main eruption couldn't be more
than minutes away. Sibyl rolled over and tried to gain her knees. Pain stabbed
through her belly, her groin, her back. She sobbed aloud. She wouldn't have to wait
for the volcano to kill her. She felt as though she were bleeding to death where she
lay. (L.E.)
2. Novelists write for countless different reasons, for money, for fame, for
reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity,
for amusement; as skilled furniture-makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards
like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an
enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though
not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create
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worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot
plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a
genuinely created world must be independent of its creator: a planned world (a
world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters
and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. (J. I.)
3. When Rachel pulls out into traffic, he turns and checks his reflection in
the plateglass window. His face is still ruddy, a little tan left over from a weekend
spent out at Montauk. Behind his glasses, pale lines splinter out from the edges of
his eyes, like cracked glaze on pottery. There's also a little silvering at the temples
that wasn't there when Caitlin last saw him. You could make a case that the gray
hairs go with the suit and the tan. Makes him look successful, he decides. All in all,
looking pretty good at thirty-eight, one of the last of his crowd who hasn't gotten
thin on top or thick in the middle. (D.D.)
4. Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with. He was quiet in
his ways and his habits were regular. It was rare for him to be up after ten at night
and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning. His
very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual
observer. In height he was rather over six feel and so excessively lean that he
seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing save during those
intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin hawklike nose gave his
whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence
and squareness which mark the man of determination. (C. D.)
Task 2. Read the text “Stalking” by Joyce Carol Oates and analyse it
according to the questions:
1. What is the story about?
2. Is there any exposition in the story? What does it begins with?
3. When and how do you get to know preliminary information about the main
character?
4. In what tense is the story written? Why?
5. What kind of narration is it? Why?
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6. What kind of character is Gretchen?
7. Does the author express his attitude to Gretchen or let e reader judge?
8. What kind of girl is Gretchen? How do you know? How does she live?
What is she interested in?
9. What do you know about her family?
10. What is the Adversary? Is it a man or a thing? What is it for Gretchen?
What kind of conflict is depicted in the story?
11. What can you say about your actions in the store?
12. What is the main idea of the story?
STALKING
The Invisible Adversary is fleeting across a field.
Gretchen, walking slowly, deliberately, watches with her keen unblinking
Joyce Carol Oates
eyes the figure of the Invisible Adversary some distance ahead. The Adversary has
run boldly in front of all that traffic — on long spiky legs brisk as colt's legs — and
jumped up onto a curb of new concrete, and now is running across a vacant field.
The Adversary glances over his shoulder at Gretchen.
Bastard, Gretchen thinks.
Saturday afternoon. November. A cold gritty day. Gretchen is out stalking.
She has hours for her game. Hours. She is dressed for the hunt, her solid legs
crammed into old blue jeans, her big, square, strong feet jammed into white leather
boots that cost her mother forty dollars not long ago, but are now scuffed and filthy
with mud. Hopeless to get them clean again, Gretchen doesn't give a damn. She is
wearing dark green corduroy jacket that is worn out at the elbows and the rear, with
a zipper that can be zipped swiftly up or down, attached to a fringed leather strip.
On her head nothing, though it is windy today.
She has hours ahead.
Cars and trucks and buses from the city and enormous trucks hauling
automobiles pass by on the highway; Gretchen waits until the way is nearly clear,
then starts out. A signal car is approaching. Slow down, you bastard, Gretchen
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