2. Functions of Literary works and the tasks of the writers
There are some ideas about literary works’ functions. For example: Literature is the aesthetic examination and reflection of man and his history, the direct manifestation of the development of human civilization. It is to reveal the “true, good and beautiful” over against the “false, ugly and evil”, like a camera to reveal the world as it is.——By Realism; Literary works are viewed as great only when they are progressive. That is, when they support the cause of the society in which they are created. Literature is to expose and reveal the principles and mechanism and the driving forces that propels the progress of human society.——By Marxist Critic Perspective. The following is my idea.
It is easy for us to take granted that literature we read is a source of amusement or entertainment. There is no denying that, in most cases, this is one of the purposes for which literature is written. However, the major of literature also performs many social functions which can have a vast impact of the way members of the community. Any member of literature, a Greek tragedy, a medieval romance, a Shakespearian play, or even a fairy tale, is colored by the social experiences of the author. Literature works to reflect and examine the ways in which particular societies or social groups view the world. This, in turn, helps us to better understand other cultures, classes.
Reading literature won't by itself make you a better person and it certainly won't get you a job. But it can help you to acquire a habit of observation, a sensitivity to the unsaid but implied, an ability to step outside of your own perspective to understand the perceptions of others. And these skills will help you to get you a job--and to advance once you have that job--because the abilities to analyze complex situations, to communicate with and to understand others, and to think creatively are valuable.
Literature has often functioned as a mirror of its times. Literature has been used to advocate for social reforms (e.g. Harriet Tubman’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Percy Shelley’s early poetry). Literature can also be used for social commentary, which is often done in the form of a satire. Examples would be Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Lord Byron’s Don Juan.
As literature is based on social life, it will influence on people’s life. As far as I am concerned, one of literature’s functions is to entertain the public. It helps us grow, both personally and intellectually; It enables us to transcend our immediate time, place and culture and to make connections with other human beings and their concerns; it enables us to recognize human dreams and struggles in different places and times that we would never otherwise know.
It enables us to develop a perspective on the events that occur around us and in the world at large, thereby enabling us to gain understanding and control. Through cumulative experience in reading, great literature shapes our goals and values by helping us clarify our own identities, both positively, through acceptance of the admirable in human beings, and negatively, through rejection of the sinister. It helps us shape our judgments through the comparison of the good and the bad. Literature allows us access to the wisdom of those who have come before us, learned the hard lessons of life, and written down their observations so that we might learn vicariously and gain in wisdom without having to make the same mistakes that others have made. It uses, as an example, William Shakespeare’s play, Othello, which helps us to understand how completely people can deceive themselves and how difficult it may be to determine whether a person is, in fact, good or evil.
It allows you to understand different things that you may or may not experience in your own life, aspects of human nature or events or whatever. It is a medium used to convey ideas and feelings, an art form like dance, painting.
As one of literature’s functions is entertainment, to make people enjoy something beautiful and have beautiful feelings, it is writer’s responsibility to create beauty.
To speak out the common concerns which others aren’t able to do.
Appreciation of “The Unicorn in the Garden”
1. The Brief Introduction of the Author
James Thurber (1894 –1961) is an American writer and cartoonist, one of the most popular humorists of his time. He is generally acknowledged as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain (1835-1910). The name James Thurber has become synonymous with American humor. James Thurber’s witty short stories and lumpy cartoons were a popular mainstay of The New Yorker magazine in the 1930s and 1940s. His best-known story is The Secret Life of , the tale of a henpecked husband who escapes into heroic daydreams. James Thurber's funny, loopy, absurdist cartoons featured men, women, dogs and other strange animals. His stories are full of sophistication, charm and wit. James Thurber obviously was deeply suspicious of women. In many of his stories they appear as dominating, dangerous, and ugly figures, with whom no one can reason. In The Catbird Seat, for example, the central conflict is between a retiring male office worker and the loud, brassy woman who threatens his position at the company; he at first seriously considers killing her but then figures out an ingenious plan to get her fired instead. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the conflict is between Walter and his dominating wife, who belittles and emasculates him at every turn. In The Unicorn in the Garden, the henpecked husband -- in a surprising denouement -- has his wife committed for harboring the very delusion of which she accused him. Women, Thurber seems to say, must be dealt with firmly and decisively, or they will ruin your life. His works are, with serious and rich social significance, combined his humor with the profound cultural intension and philosophy of life to disclose the folly of the ordinary people and ridiculous happenings in the daily life so as to inspire people to see things in their true color and to have a clear idea of the reality, letting people reflect and giving them inspiration.
2. The Brief Analysis of the Story
The short story The Unicorn in the Garden written in 1939 by James Thurber is about a woman who thinks her husband is crazy, but later on she is the one who is thought to be mad. This story is well developed and has an appropriate structure. The plot of Thurber’s fable The Unicorn in the Garden can be summarized in only a few paragraphs. A man wakes his wife to tell her there is a unicorn in the garden, eating the flowers. Without getting up to look out the window, she tells him there can’t be: “A unicorn is a mythical beast.” He goes back into the garden, returns again to the bedroom, and repeats his assertion. His wife, still not getting up to look out the window, warns him that “You’re a booby…and I’m going to have to put you in the booby hatch.”
After the man returns to the garden, the wife -- with “a gloat in her eye” -- calls the police and a psychiatrist. When they arrive, she tells them what her husband said to her, assuming that they will lock him up (which is clearly what she wants). The police and the psychiatrist ask her husband whether there is, in fact, a unicorn in the garden, and he says “Of course not. The unicorn is a mythical beast.”
Consequently, they lock up the wife -- which is clearly what the husband wants. Thurber even attaches a moral – “Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.” The moral of the fable is: “Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.” This means that things you do which are bad for someone else, in the end often turn out to be bad for yourself. It’s bad to bully someone with animus. And the one must be care of that don’t fall into his own trap. I think there could be a better moral for this story, for example: “You’ve got to watch you don’t fall into your own trap.”
At 530 words, including the tagline “”, The Unicorn in the Garden qualifies as a . Short story tends to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a small number of characters, and covers a short period of time. A short story should be brief enough to be read in a single sitting. A short story should stick to one plot, unlike a longer work of fiction where added details and complex plots are common. Reduce the words and unnecessary dialogue. Use only key descriptions and bring out atmosphere and feeling through the words. It has some typical features: limited number of characters, short time span, one main action, limited places of action.
Short stories usually have properties like the following:
• Dramatic conflict: Usually the basis of the story.
• Foreshadowing: Many stories, despite an ending that may surprise some, May be used to leave clues in the story to lure readers to try to predict the ending.
• Repetition: At the least, it helps drive home a point. It can also be used to create other literary devices.
• Suspense. Draw readers’ attention to the work.
• Symbolism and metaphor. By drawing parallels between smaller objects and larger concepts, writers can create stories that others can relate to.
And we can find such properties are presented in this story. After the husband told his wife that there was the unicorn in the garden, his wife was so angry that she wanted to have her husband put in the booby-hatch, then the husband said: “we’ll see about that.” This indicates that the story will go in a different way. And when the husband told his wife about the unicorn, the wife’s response and attitude, “she opened one unfriendly eye”, “turned her back on him”, etc, told us that they had a bad relationship. “they had a hard time subduing her…but they finally subdued her”, “the unicorn is a mythical beast”. This is repetition. the unicorn and the flowers the unicorn eat, rose, lily，tulip, are symbolic and metaphor methods.
3. The Temperament and Character of the Couple
Thurber is master at the way he presents his comic arguments, his precise attention to detail, and his unsurpassed ability to make a surprise ending seem like something we should have been able to predict all along. The ending of the story is out of my expectation. It is beyond my imagination that I immediately like it much more. Because I always believe that the husband really saw the unicorn in the garden. However, it is not until the end of the story that I realize that the entire story was made up by the husband. And his intension was to get rid of his wife. Until the last two paragraphs, however, I have no indication that the husband feels the same way. Thurber still did not give us any indication whether the husband has planned this outcome all along; in other words, he leaves completely open the question of whether there was ever a unicorn in the garden at all. However, Thurber does told us that after the wife was committed to a mental institution, “the husband lived happily ever after”,so we can see that up till then, the whole story was planned meticulously by the man.
At one hand, this story is a story of a bad marriage. This couple essentially lived two separate lives in the same house. This can be proved by looking at their conversation. In such a sunny morning, the husband was sitting in a breakfast nook, enjoying the meal and the fresh air, but the wife was still asleep in the bedroom upstairs. And her attitude towards the man was cold, indifferent. “She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him”, “turned her back on him”. Although they speak about the same subject they do not understand each other. The husband sees and feeds the unicorn and she thinks it is a “mythical beast”. The man refers to the unicorn as “he” and she says “it”. He wants to share his delight and emotions but she refuses. When she wants to send him to a mental hospital he turns the case by quoting her in an ironical way. So in the end they are separated. The woman in Thurber’s story does not know whether there’s a unicorn in the garden, and she doesn’t care; she immediately sees how her husband’s assertion can be used to get rid of him. In other words, she isn’t interested in getting inside his head; she isn’t interested in sharing his vision of life; she’s only interested in pursuing her own agenda, which doesn’t include her husband. The moral acknowledges the husband’s victory, achieved by a role reversal: the husband stakes claim to the realistic answers expected by the psychiatrist and the police after the wife ironically repeats the husband’s earlier fantastic claims.
This story is generally consistent with the format of a much older literary form, the fable, and it has some fairy-tale features. The first sentence “once upon a sunny morning” and the last sentence “the husband lived happily ever after.” are typical sentences of fairy tales. Obviously it is a fable, because the story has a moral at the end. What is different about this fable that it is not – as fables usually are about animals. A fable is a traditional short story that teaches a moral lesson. But the main characters in this fable are a man and a woman. The author presented the characters of the husband and the wife mainly through the following two ways: Actions of the character; Conversations the character engages in. the author. Such as “opened one unfriendly eye…”, “turned her back on him”, “you are a booby, and I am going to have you in the booby-hatch”, “dressed as fast as she could”, “there was a gloat in her eyes”… all these words a vivid image of the wife: selfish, evil, less feel no sympathy or consideration to her husband. At the first sight, we see the husband was the mousy, henpecked person, who lives under the control of his domineering wife. His role seems to be clear through the whole story. He saw the unicorn and his wife did not believe him. He even tries to talk to the unicorn. So he seems to be simple-minded in some kind. But this is only superficial; All the more his behavior at the end of the fable is surprising. He refuses to admit having ever told his wife about a unicorn in their garden. So it is the man is the cunning person in this story but not the woman. At the beginning of the fable he tells his wife that he can see a unicorn in the garden. She does not seem to be as excited as her husband and reacts quite coldly and bored. But as soon as she is alone she calls the police and a psychiatrist to set a trap for her husband, as it is probably not the first time that he told her something like that and maybe she does not like him any more. When her husband comes back into the house, the police a psychiatrist are still there and they think the woman is crazy. They ask him if it is right that he told his wife he saw a unicorn. He gave the police the same answer as his wife had given him: “The unicorn is a mythical beast.” He probably knew that his wife would call the police and he left the house so that she could do it. And when he came back into the house, he saw that everything went according to his plan. Now his wife is in an institution and he can live his life happily.
The woman firstly gives people the impression that she is dominating the matrimony, , feel no sympathy or consideration to her husband. She is an evil person in readers’ eyes; just like in fable it always the women act the witches. She called her husband “booby” and wanted to put him in the “booby-hatch”. Maybe she has been waiting a long time for the moment to get rid of her husband. And when he tells her the story about the unicorn it is the right time for her and she calls the police and a psychiatrist as soon as she is alone. The man acts similarly but his plan is better than his wife’s plan. He knows that if he tells her a story about a unicorn and leaves her alone for a couple of minutes she will call the police. And he is right!
4. The Symbolic Meanings of the Flowers
Beside the two persons, symbolic meanings of flowers are very important in this fable. The language of flowers, was a means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken. So the author selects three kinds of flowers to express his intended meanings. The first flower the unicorn eats is roses. They are a symbol of love and affection. The unicorn eat the roses firstly, maybe it indicate that their marriage will break up in the end. And we can predict the ending from another meanings of flower—tulips. They are a declaration of true love. And when the husband told his wife about the unicorn, his wife responded coldly, the man came back to the garden; the unicorn was browsing the tulips. This again forebodes the ending. The lily with which the man fed the unicorn is a symbol for faith, purity and innocence. The white unicorn eats the white lily out of the man’s hand. Maybe he husband himself believes himself was an innocent person and he fed the unicorn the lily rather any flowers. It was out of conscious.
In fact, we can see that the man was having his scrambled eggs which had the white color of albumen and the yellow color of yolk which coincide with the colors of the unicorn-- a white unicorn with a gold horn. So the author selects these symbols elaborately, not optionally.
5. Conclusion
Just as we learn the lesson in this story: we’ve got to watch you don’t fall into your own trap. James Thurber combined his humor with the philosophy of life to disclose the folly of the ordinary people and ridiculous happenings in the daily life so as to inspire people reflect and giving them inspiration.
Reference:
1.王薇坚，James Thurber and His Humor，盐城工学院学报(社会科学版)，2000第4期
2.岳良星，据微型小说特点比较分析《花园里的独角兽》的两篇译文, 文学语言学研究，2010第31期
3.侯晓华、刘定远，对《花园里的独角兽》的语篇分析，和田师范专科学校学报，2007第2卷第一期，总第45期
4.王琴芳,从《花园里的独角兽》与《敞开的窗户》人物语言对比浅谈短篇小说之人物语言特性, 2008.04（上旬刊）
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6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story
