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  3. The life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest an

The life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest an

游客2023-11-14  43
问题     The life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career — consisting of a long short story called "Hapworth 16, 1924" that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods — overshadow the achievements of the first half.
    The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naive youthful narrator. But in "The Catcher in the Rye" Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers.
    Nearly everybody loves "The Catcher in the Rye," and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger’s first collection of short stories, "Nine Stories." But the work that followed, such as "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction," were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude.
    These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn’t "get it." The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of "Catcher" — highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader — but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality.
    The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," by Laurence Sterne. There is the same close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading. This cultural and spiritual elitism got up the noses of many critics, but I think they overlooked the fact that Mr. Salinger was playing a game with his readers. The more truth-telling and pseudo-historical the stories became in form, the less credible became the content. [br] Which of the following is nearest in meaning to "solitude" in Paragraph 3?
选项 A、Darkness
B、Being alone
C、Being sick
D、Wildness
答案 B
解析 词汇题。文中的“retreat”和“wounded”两词是判断词义的线索。
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