英美文学赏析——小说与读者

本书每个单元荟萃3篇经典短篇，对上述哲学问题给予文学独特的阐释与解答。通过对经典作品与作家具有穿刺力的“导读”与“提问”，每个单元围绕上述6个环环相扣的主题，给予读者*有灵性的启迪。
本书可供高校英语专业和非英语专业的本科生使用。 

本书为读者提供了一片视野、一面棱镜，以看破生活的迷雾、透析人性的本质。本书将诸短篇小说按照主题分为6个单元：“何为人？”“人所遭遇的逆境”“人该如何应对？”“人所应珍惜的价值” “人所应拥有的生存观” “生命的归宿”。

I. The Person: What Is a Human Being? ……………………………………………. 1
A&P / John Updike ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 4
Lullaby / Leslie Marmon Silko …………………………………………………………………………….. 11
The Lady with the Dog / Anton Chekhov …………………………………………………………….. 20
The Kiss / Anton Chekhov ………………………………………………………………………………….. 34
II. Personal Struggle: What Adversaries Do Human Beings Face? ……….. 51
My Kinsman, Major Molineux / Nathaniel Hawthorne ………………………………………… 54
On the Road / Langston Hughes …………………………………………………………………………. 70
Coffee Break / Langston Hughes …………………………………………………………………………. 75
How the “Soviet” Robinson Crusoe Was Written / Ilya Ilf and Eugeni Petrov………… 79
III. Conduct: How Should a Person Act? ………………………………………….. 87
Soldier’s Home / Ernest Hemingway ……………………………………………………………………. 89
Barn Burning / William Faulkner ……………………………………………………………………….. 97
He / Doris Lessing …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 113
The Heroine / Isak Dinesen……………………………………………………………………………….. 120
IV. Values: What Should a Person Value? …………………………………………135
Greenleaf / Flannery O’Connor …………………………………………………………………………. 137
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ………………………………. 156
The Skylark and the Frog / Chuang-Tzu ……………………………………………………………. 166
The Lottery / Shirley Jackson …………………………………………………………………………….. 169
V. Outlook: What Views of Existence Can a Person Have? ………………………..179
The Wall / Jean-Paul Sartre ………………………………………………………………………………. 181
The Story of an Hour / Kate Chopin ………………………………………………………………….. 197
The Maker / Jorge Luis Borges …………………………………………………………………………… 201
Gimpel the Fool / Isaac Bashevis Singer …………………………………………………………….. 204
VI. Purpose: For What Ends Can a Person Live? ………………………………219
Flowering Judas / Katherine Anne Porter …………………………………………………………… 221
“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman / Harlan Ellison …………………………………… 232
Quality / John Galsworthy ………………………………………………………………………………… 243
The Student / Anton Chekhov ………………………………………………………………………….. 250

Preface
15 years ago, Gary and I attended a conference in Toronto; 15 years later, I was in Toronto
alone. Gary had several wishes for me—to publish this book and the collection of my poems.
This book is of great significance to us. Throughout his life, Gary was completely and
thoroughly in love with literature. We studied literature as if we were studying life. e framework
of this book shows our lifelong e ort of studying literature, understanding literature, studying life
and understanding life. And the most striking innovation is its thematic organization, not found
in other college-level short story anthologies: “The Person: What Is Human Being?” “Personal
Struggle: What Adversaries Do Humans Face?” “Conduct: How Does a Person Act?” “Value: What
Should a Person Value?” “Outlook: What Views of Existence Can a Person Have?” “Purpose: To
What Ends Can a Person Live? ” is fresh organizational scheme re ects the great endeavor of
both ction writer and its readers to understand the truth of life.
e strength of this book partially lies in that its choices are not limited to any nation or age,
although its selected short stories mainly come from English literature. e best short stories of
Western literature have been included here for their power to touch our hearts. Glossary of literary
terms should have been provided, which we will surely make up in the second edition of this book
e teaching and reading of this book will be of great value to those seeking the meaning of
life, which is all Gary ever wanted.
Huaijing Xu
2018.9

E英美文学赏析——小说与读者
NGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERTATURE—FICTION AND ITS READERS
7
The Person: What Is a Human Being? I
Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody’s luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full
of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he
hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest,
but he doesn’t miss that much. He comes over and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach.”
Queenie blushes, though maybe it’s just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the rst time,
now that she was so close. “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.” Her voice kind
of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people rst, coming out so at and dumb yet
kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks”. All of a sudden I slid right down her
voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats
and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks o a big plate
and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When
my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a real racy a air Schlitz in tall glasses
with “ ey’ll Do It Every Time” cartoons stenciled on.
“ at’s all right,” Lengel said. “But this isn’t the beach.” His repeating this struck me as funny,
as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A&P was a great big
dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn’t like my smiling—as I say he doesn’t miss much—but
he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare.
Queenie’s blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the
back—a really sweet can—pipes up, “We weren’t doing any shopping. We just came in for the one
thing.”
“ at makes no di erence,” Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that
he hadn’t noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. “We want you decently dressed when you
come in here.”
“We are decent,” Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she
remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A&P must look pretty crummy.
Fancy Herring Snacks ashed in her very blue eyes.
“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. A er this come in here with your shoulders covered.
It’s our policy.” He turns his back. at’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the
others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep,
seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as
peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous,
8
most of all Lengel, who asks me, “Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?”
I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking. I go through the punches. It’s
more complicated than you think, and a er you do it o en enough, it begins to make a little song,
that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) happy pee-pul (splat)”—the splat
being the drawer ying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come
from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and
a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it
over, all the time thinking.
e girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick
enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep
right on going, into the electric eye; the door ies open and they icker across the lot to their car,
Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me
with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
“Did you say something, Sammy?”
“I said I quit.”
“I thought you did.”
“You didn’t have to embarrass them.”
“It was they who were embarrassing us.”
I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo”. It’s a saying of my grand-mother’s,
and I know she would have been pleased.
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start
shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to
knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He’s been a friend of my parents
for years. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true. I don’t.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron,
“Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of
it. e bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel
says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me
so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “peepul” and the drawer splats
out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer that I can follow this up with a clean exit,
there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes.