1148307江玉园第四次写作作业

1.《Moby Dick》：Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael.
Comments: It’s one of the three most famous words in the American literary tradition. It’s the most casual and most stylish beginning of a novel in the 19th century. It may seem casual, conversational, and friendly when we first look at it. Actually Ishmael is a person from the Bible, a contested figure. Ishmael has a different status in Christianity than he has in Muslim thinking. Ishmael is a big hero. It’s Ishmael who comes nack to Abraham in the Quran not Isaac. It’s the outcast, possibly somebody who has found this great alternative tradition, immediately in three words, we’ve got a very complicated kind of textual literary dynamic going on. Maybe it’s a little bit coercive. Its an imperative. Syntactically, it’s an order.
2.《A Tale of Two Cities》：Charles Dickens
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdon, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Comments: Those words easy to provoke our thinking are at the same time able to endure our critical thinking. It means there is no absolute truth and every coin has two sides. It is the best declaration for the age when Dickens was living at. For the 19th century in Britain where revolutions occured restlessly, this is the most perfect expression of people’s shocks in their minds. This is Dickens’s interpretations for his age, and it also becomes the interpretations for all ages as long as this society lasts.
3.《A Hundred Years of Solitude》：Garcia Marquez
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remenber that diatant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Comments: It is classic for its flashback from future to past. In addition, its charm also lies in its unique skill in presenting life’s experiences. When people are faced with death, what will occur to their minds? There must be terror for death and reluctance to leave the world of course. But actually more memories of their lives’ journey will flood into their brains at that moment. They will sink into the depth of their memories, thinking of those things and experiences glittering there which generally seems ordinary and common. In this way, the author starts the story by the “ice”.