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Re-exploring O. Henry’s Short Stories——A(2)

时间:2009-03-01 00:00 来源:www.yingyulunwen.com 点击:次

15.dyouburnyourhand,Dele?""Fiveo#39;clock,Ithink,"saidDele,plaintively. 16.behappening?"askedIkey."Nineo#39;clock,"saidMr.McGowan."Supper#39;satse 17.ooktomakehimthinkit!"Atnineo#39;clockDulcietookat

15.d you burn your hand, Dele?" "Five o#39;clock, I think," said Dele, plaintively.

16.be happening?" asked Ikey. "Nine o#39;clock," said Mr. McGowan. "Supper#39;s at se

17.ook to make him think it!" At nine o#39;clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers a

18.he announced. "It was exactly ten o#39;clock when we parted here at the restaura

Further observation of the file names in the corpus leads to a conclusion that all stories except one happened to take place from dusk to the late night. Is there any coincidence? Perhaps in the daytime the common masses in New York were excessively busy with worrying about their means of livelihood. Only after work or after supper did they have time to take part in some social activities, such as ‘dinner’, ‘ball’, ‘café’, ‘park’, and ‘play’ which appear in the context of the three temporal keywords. This is a reflection of social and cultural contexts at the early 1920s in America. People, whether poor or rich, would like to take a cup of coffee in a café or have a glass of drink at a pub. Young girls dreamed of dancing with their beloved partners at the ball of the lower class.

The noun keywords about the physical places where the events took place can be roughly grouped into two types: indoor places and outdoor places. Some unexpected incidents might happen in a ‘room’, ‘restaurant’, ‘flat’, ‘store’, or on the second ‘floor’, or even near a ‘dresser’, ‘table’ and ‘desk’ inside. They are such common and everyday places that one can’t expect any conspicuous incident to happen at these places. However, the author was wise enough to arrange his unusual stories in quite ordinary settings. Other adventures might be experienced at the ‘street’, ‘corner’, ‘sidewalk’, or at the Second ‘Avenue’, or even on the ‘bench’ in a little ‘park’. In O.Henry’s stories there were no places of imposing scale or unique style. But they were places perfectly matched with the stories of the common people.

Whether in the indoor places like ‘restaurant’, ‘store’ and ‘flat’, or at the outdoor places like ‘street’, ‘corner’ and ‘sidewalk’, there embedded some unknown possibilities for the coming events. It was at these inconspicuous and ordinary places that the unexpected and accidental coincidences took place all the time. O.Henry is good at writing about ordinary people in everyday circumstances. He is quoted as once saying, ‘There are stories in everything. I’ve got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts and newspaper stands.’

5.Exploring Themes by Noun keywords

A range of frequent noun keywords help to figure out the major themes in O.Henry’s works. To better investigate what these noun keywords reveal, it is necessary to further categorize them according to their denotations. The following Table 5.1 shows the categorization.

Table 5.1 Frequent Noun Keywords in the minor corpus

Denoting people

Genders

Professions

Characteristics

Man, lady, girl, Miss, Mr., Missis,

policeman, palmist, waiter, broker, lumberman, typewriter,

cosmopolite, friend, longnecker, prince, gentleman,

Denoting things

cab, fare, hat, cents, twenty, odour, coat, cigar, dollars, dandelions, two, doggie, card, clock, cards, umbrella, money, art, adventure, hop, leaf, Rubberneck, dinner

Noun keywords can expose explicit topics rather than the underlying themes in the texts. As seen in Table 5.1, a majority of nouns are used to denote people, either distinguishing the characters’ genders or professions or describing their special traits. It is notable that such professions were usually taken up by people in the middle or lower social classes. Only a few of them were lucky enough to make their fortune and control their own lives; whereas most of them who earned their mere living were controlled by their miserable fates. Most of O. Henry#39;s stories took place in the New York City, and dealt for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, and waitresses. It is the author’s rich life experiences and burdens of life pressure that became the source of depicting such a variety of professions.

Another larger group of noun keywords denoting things are scattered in different stories. They are closely related with the theme of each story; therefore, it is unlikely to make any generalization. However, the concordance lines of the numeral words ‘twenty’ and ‘two’ sorted out some distinctive collocational sequences that attract our attention. Both frequently co-occur with temporal nouns. In the case of ‘twenty’, more than 40 per cent of its occurrences (nineteen out of 42 frequencies) are accompanied by temporal words, such as ‘years, minutes, hours, days, seconds’. The word ‘two’ is also likely to appear with temporal nouns, such as ‘weeks, hours, days, years, minutes’. Such sequences of numbers and temporal nouns indicate that most of O.Henry’s short stories develop for a short period. Some events took weeks or days to develop, and other anecdotes might come to an end in a moment. As discussed above, the longest passage of time turns out to be ‘twenty years’, which is entirely related with the story ‘After Twenty Years’. This reflects another realistic feature that in his stories events usually happened at a specific time. The merits of concrete description of time shorten the distance between the characters inside the story and the readers outside.

There is true love in his stories. ‘Love’ as one keyword stands out to praise the touching true love between a destitute couple. Either in ‘The Gift of the Magi’ or in ‘A Service of Love’, the couple in the humble circumstance helped and loved each other unselfishly and wholeheartedly. Their perfect and innocent love bound up in the fetters of money seemed even more impressive and moving.

6.Conclusion

Through corpus-based method, stylistics of O.Henry’s one collection of short stories has been explored. As Stubbs (2005: 21-22) proposes, ‘… observational data can provide more systematic evidence for unavoidable subjective interpretation’. Different from the former studies on O.Henry’s works, the present paper has attempted to delay interpretation and prolong analysis, giving weight to quantitative investigation. The keywords and concord functions of Wordsmith Tools attribute to find out or reconfirm some unique features of O.Henry’s works. The paper has come to the following conclusions:

（1）The higher TTR in the working corpus proves O.Henry’s lexical diversity and witty narration. The shorter mean sentence length reveals that his stories progress rapidly, and show a rigid economy of words, which are customarily short – most of the stories run about eight hundred words.

（2）The frequent noun keywords give a clue to the setting of O.Henry’s short stories. The temporal keywords tell that all but one story happened in the evening and the duration of time was not long. Some accidents even took place in a few hours. The location keywords denote several ordinary places in a city where something accidental might occur with the author’s witty arrangement.

（3）Another group of noun keywords casts light on the general themes of O.Henry’s short stories. Some identify people by revealing their genders, professions and characteristics. Others identify things that give information of the themes of stories.

This is a tentative study of corpus-based stylistic analysis on O.Henry’s one collection of short stories. The basic statistic information computed by Wordsmith Tools can help reassess subjective assertions in stylistic criticism. A corpus-based further study is expected to explore his styles in terms of perspective, characterization and language features. What is more, the corpus-based method can be introduced into literature class to help students generalize the unique features of an author in terms of stylistics.

【References】

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