英美短篇小 说Unit 8 Across the bridge

按一下以編輯母片標題樣式,按一下以編輯母片,第二層,第三層,第四層,第五層,*,按一下以編輯母片標題樣式,按一下以編輯母片,第二層,第三層,第四層,第五層,*,Graham Greene,Unit 8,Across the Bridge,Graham Greene,Born on October 2,1904 in Berkhamsted,Hertfordshire.The fourth of six children,Greene was a shy and sensitive youth.He disliked sports and was often truant from school in order to read adventure stories by authors such as Rider Haggard and R.M.Ballantyne.These novels had a deep influence on him and helped shape his writing style.,Educated at Balliol College,Oxford,and had a natural talent for writing.In 1926,he converted to Roman Catholicism.,Graham Greene,Greene adored T.S.Eliot and Herbert Read;his analyst introduced him to a literary circle.After he graduated,he worked as a sub-editor at the,Times,of London(1926-1930)and at the,Spectators,where he was a film critic and a literary editor until 1940.,Besides,during the WWII,he also worked for the British Foreign Office,and the Secret Intelligence Service(SIS)sent him to Sierra Leone.He later worked under Kim Philby,a future defector to the Soviet Union.,Graham Greene,Among all his relationships with women,the one with Catherine Walston was the most important.,The role of Catherine as Greenes mistress and muse,roughly between 1946 and 1957,has been an open secret to Greene scholars and among his family and friends for many years.,Graham Greene,The End of the Affair,(1951)was partly based on this affair.In real life,Greene met Mrs.Walston after her conversion to Roman Catholicism,when she asked him to be her godfather.He was 42 then and internationally celebrated for novels;she was 30,and the mother of 6 children.,Greene was always tortured by the affair,and left in his personal papers a fascinating trail of clues as to the importance of the relationship in his life,though he never revealed this affair in his autobiographies.,As a writer Greene was very prolific and versatile.Many of his novels are based on his own experiences as an agent in the British Foreign Office.The Asian settings also stimulated Greenes many novels.,He wrote 5 dramas and screenplays for several films based on his novels.Greenes film reviews are still worth reading and often better than the film he praised or slashed.,Although Greene knew that some critics considered his novels entertainment,his own models were,Henry James,Joseph Conrad,and Ford Madox Ford.,In his personal library was a large collection of Jamess work.,Graham Greene,Perhaps the ultimate moralist thriller-writer,Greene had a facility for combing literary observation with populist plot,and himself divided his books into serious fiction and“entertainments.Evelyn Waugh,also a famous English writer,singled out for praise the new coolly cinematic quality of his style,but he is now most known for a sort of atheistic Catholicism.,Graham Greene,Aside from his exotic trips,Greenes also achieved notoriety in his personal life.Greenes financial success as an author enabled him to live very comfortably in London,Antibes,and Capri.Towards the end of his life,Greene lived in Vevey,Switzerland with his companion Yvonne Cloetta.He died there peacefully on April 3,1991.,Graham Greene,Novels:,Brighton Rock(1938),The Power and the Glory(1940),The Heart of the Matter(1948),The Third Man(1950),The End of the Affair,(1951),Novels set in sites of topical journalistic interest:,The Quiet American,(1955)a prescient account of early American involvement in Vietnam;,Our Man in Havana(1958),set in Cuba;,A Burnt-Out Case(1961),in the Belgian Congo just before its independence;,The Comedians(1966),in Franois Duvaliers Haiti;and,The Captain and the Enemy(1980),in Panama.,Plays,The Living Room(1953),The Potting Shed(1957),Major works,Introduction of the story,The story is told first-person by an unnamed narrator who reveals little about himself,other than that he is a wandering stranger stranded in a small Mexican border village.,The narrator is fascinated by Joseph Calloway,a famous con-man believed to be extremely wealthy,who is in the Mexican village on the run from the law.,The narrator claims to feel sympathy not for Calloway but for Calloways dog,an ugly creature that he repeatedly kicks.,Two detectives enter the village looking for Calloway,but though they have several conversations with the con-man,they never realize he is their quarry.Meanwhile,Calloway,overcome by homesickness for America,manages to get himself secreted across the border.,In the end,Calloway is killed by the detectives car,apparently while trying to save the dogs life.The narrator claims to find something comic in the end of Calloways life.He writes“Death doesnt change comedy to tragedy.,The reader is left to evaluate the meaning of this statement and to weigh both the tragic and the comic elements of the story.,The story builds its tension ondramatic irony,with the narrator knowing more about the story than both Calloway and the detectives,and the Mexican natives knowing more than the narrator,who says,“Any man doing dusty business in any of t