Рефераты. American Literature books summary






he feels that he will not get to the other side of the street each time he

comes to the end of a block. He feels that he would just go down. He makes

believe that he is with Allie every time he reaches a curb. Holden decides

that he will go away, never go home again and never go to another prep

school. He thinks he will pretend to be a deaf-mute so that he won't have

to deal with stupid conversations. Holden goes to Phoebe's school to find

her and say goodbye. At the school he sees "fuck you" written on the wall,

and becomes enraged as he tries to scratch it off. He writes her a note

asking her to meet him near the Museum of Art so that he can return her

money. While waiting for Phoebe at the Museum, Holden chats with two

brothers who talk about mummies. He sees another "fuck you" written on the

wall, and is convinced that someone will write that below the name on his

tombstone. Holden, suffering from diarrhea, goes to the bathroom, and as he

exits the bathroom he passes out. When he regains consciousness, he feels

better. Phoebe arrives, wearing Holden's hunting hat and dragging Holden's

old suitcase. She tells him that she wants to come with him. She begs, but

he refuses and causes her to start crying. She throws the red hunting hat

back at Holden and starts to walk away. She follows Holden to the zoo, but

refuses to talk to him or get near him. He buys Phoebe a ticket for the

carousel there, and watches her go around on it as "Smoke Gets in Your

Eyes" plays. Afterwards, she takes back the red hunting hat and goes back

on the carousel. As it starts to rain, Holden cries while watching Phoebe.

Chapter Twenty-Six:

Holden ends his story there. He refuses to tell what happened after he went

home and how he got sick. He says that people are concerned about whether

he will apply himself next year. He tells that D.B. visits often, and he

often misses Stradlater, Ackley, and even Maurice. However, he advises not

to tell anybody anything, because it is this that causes a person to start

missing others.

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

SOME INFO ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall

Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was

educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he

was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most

were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On

graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less sheltered

environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was

employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for

military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World

War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918,

not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at

Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell

in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry

him. These were experiences he was never to forget.

After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing,

for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a

foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other

American writers in Paris--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound--

he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1923

his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was

published in New York City. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a

novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but

sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and

Spain--members of the postwar "lost generation," a phrase that Hemingway

scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the

limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life.

Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer

Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.The writing

of books occupied him for most of the postwar years. He remained based in

Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, or

hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background

for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been

advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the

stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933.

Among his finest stories are "The Killers," "The Short Happy Life of

Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." At least in the public

view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works.

Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway

developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with

war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World

War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the

English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation

after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his

post. Henry deserts during the Italians' disastrous retreat after the

Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the

border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during

childbirth, leaving Henry desolate at the loss of the great love of his

life.

Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in

Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more

as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933-34 in

the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in The Green Hills of Africa

(1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he bought a

house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel

of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is

set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence

in Key West during the Great Depression.By now Spain was in the midst of

civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips

there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in

their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and

he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged

Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on

the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war he purchased Finca

Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and

went to cover another war--the Japanese invasion of China.

The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and

peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and

impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference

to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as

measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert

Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind

the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel

concerns Jordan's relations with the varied personalities of the band,

including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue,

flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the

Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity

stirred up by the civil war. Jordan's mission is to blow up a strategic

bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he

realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he

blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave

him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist

pursuers.All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war--in A Farewell to

Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the

comradeship it creates--and as World War II progressed he made his way to

London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force

and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6,

1944).

Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he

saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He

also participated in the liberation of Paris and, although ostensibly a

journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage

in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla

activities, and intelligence collection.Following the war in Europe,

Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again.

He also traveled widely, and on a trip to Africa he was injured in a plane

crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for

The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short, heroic novel about an old Cuban

fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin

only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home.

This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his

previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a

professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been

damned.By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. He

settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as

before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was

twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he

received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in

Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had married four times

and fathered three sons.He left behind a substantial amount of manuscript,

some which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of

his years in Paris (1921-26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964.

Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out

of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana

during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in

1970.Hemingway's characters plainly embody his own values and view of life.

The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For

Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence

nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by

their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the

world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and

offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such

a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with

honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as "the

Hemingway code."

To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace

under pressure" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme

clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.Hemingway's prose style was

probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to

strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of

verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as

objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of

describing a series of actions using short, simple sentences from which all

comment or emotional rhetoric have been eliminated. These sentences are

composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and

rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting

terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant

and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway's

use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The

influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written,

particularly from the 1930s through the '50s.A consummately contradictory

man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors

of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to

re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game

hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great

delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his

popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.

Context

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in the summer of 1899.

As a young man, he left home to become a newspaper writer in Kansas City.

Early in 1918, he joined the Italian Red Cross and became an ambulance

driver in Italy, serving in the battlefield in the First World War, in

which the Italians allied with the British, the French, and the Americans,

against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In Italy, he observed the carnage and

the brutality of the Great War firsthand. On July 8, 1918, a trench mortar

shell struck him while he crouched beyond the front lines with three

Italian soldiers.

Though Hemingway embellished the story of his wounding over the years,

this much is certain: he was transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he

fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Scholars are

divided over Agnes' role in Hemingway's life and writing, but there is

little doubt that his affair with her provided the background for A

Farewell to Arms, which many critics consider to be Hemingway's greatest

novel.

Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms tells the story of Frederic

Henry, a young American ambulance driver and first lieutenant ("Tenente")

in the Italian army. Hit in the leg by a trench mortar shell in the

fighting between Italy and Austria-Hungary, Henry is transferred to a

hospital in Milan, where he falls in love with an English Red Cross nurse

named Catherine Barkley. The similarities to Hemingway's own life are

obvious.

After the war, when he had published several novels and become a famous

writer, Hemingway claimed that the account of Henry's wounding in A

Farewell to Arms was the most accurate version of his own wounding he had

ever written. Hemingway's life certainly gave the novel a trenchant

urgency, and its similarity to his own experience no doubt helped him

refine the terse, realistic, descriptive style for which he became famous,

and which made him one of the most influential American writers of the

twentieth century.

SUMMARY

Book I, Chapters 1-6

Frederic Henry begins his story by describing his situation: he is an

American in the Italian army near the front with Austria-Hungary, a mile

from the fighting. Every day he sees troops marching and hears gunfire;

often the King rides through the town. A cholera epidemic has spread

through the army, he says, but only seven thousand die of it.

His unit moves to a town in Gorizia, further from the fighting, which

continues in the mountains beyond. His situation is relatively enjoyable;

the town is not badly damaged, with nice cafes and two brothels--one for

the officers and one for the enlisted men. One day Henry sits in the mess

hall with a group of fellow officers taunting the military priest. A

captain accuses the priest of cavorting with women, and the priest blushes;

though he is not religious, Henry treats the priest kindly. After teasing

the priest, the Italians argue over where Henry should take his leave;

because the winter is approaching, the fighting will ease, and Henry, an

ambulance driver, will be able to spend some time away from the front. The

priest encourages him to visit the cold, clear country of Abruzzo, but the

other men have other suggestions.

When he returns from his leave, Henry discusses his trip with his

roommate, the surgeon Rinaldi. Henry claims to have traveled throughout

Italy, and Rinaldi, who is obsessed with beautiful girls, tells him about a

group of new English women and claims to be in love with a Miss Barkley.

Henry loans him fifty lire (Italian money). At dinner that night, the

priest is hurt that Henry failed to visit Abruzzi. Henry feels guilty, and

tells him that he wanted to visit Abruzzi.

The next morning, Henry examines the gun batteries and quizzes the

mechanics; then he travels to visit Miss Barkley and the English nurses

with Rinaldi. He is immediately struck by Miss Barkley's beauty, and

especially by her long blonde hair. Miss Barkley tells Henry that her

fiancee was killed in the battle of the Somme, and Henry tells her he has

never loved anyone. On the way back, Rinaldi observes that Miss Barkley

liked Henry more than she liked Rinaldi, but that her friend, Helen

Ferguson, was nice too.

The next day, Henry calls on Miss Barkley again. The head nurse

expresses surprise that an American would want to join the Italian army,

and tells him that Miss Barkley is gone-- but says that Henry may come back

to see her at seven o'clock that night. Henry drives back along the

trenches, eats dinner, then returns to see Miss Barkley. He finds her

waiting with Helen Ferguson; Helen excuses herself, and Henry tries to put

his arm around her. She refuses, but allows him to kiss her. Then she

begins to cry, and Henry is annoyed. When Henry goes home, Rinaldi is

amused.

Three nights later, Henry sees Miss Barkley again; she tells him to

call her Catherine. They walk through the garden, and Henry tells Catherine

he loves her, though he knows he does not. They kiss again, and he thinks

of their relationship as an elaborate game. To his surprise, she suddenly

tells him that he plays the game very well, but that it is a rotten game.

Henry sees Rinaldi later that evening, and Rinaldi, observing Henry's

romantic confusion, feel glad that he did not become involved with a

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