NettlesAlice Munro讲解Word格式.docx

1、By Alice MunroGuide to ReadingAlice Munro is a prolific writer, who has made a major careerout of short fiction. In the past 35 years, she has produced numerous short stories that are read in and outside of Canada, often appearing in such prestigious magazines as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Mont

2、hly. Today she is still active in her writing career. Like her many other stories, the subject of the story “Nettles” is about the problem of a middle-aged womanthe passions, confusions and dilemmas that any woman in a modern society might be confronted with, regardless of race, color or nationality

3、. In this story, the narrator meets her childhood friend by chance at the very stage of her life when she is caught up in a troubled relationship with her husband and her children. She is delighted with this reunion. This joy quickly turns into a tender and ambiguous feeling toward this man-a desire

4、 and passion she herself is not sure of. The two of them go through a wildstorm. In order to protect themselves from being knocked down by the violent wind, they hold each other firmly. When the wind passes, they kiss and press together in a gesture of recognition of survival. At this moment the man

5、 tells her his deepest secret. She realizes that “he was a person who had hit rock bottom.” She is happy that he treats her as a “person he had, on his own, who knew.” What happened or rather, what does not happen between them gives her a new perceptionof love, “Love that was not usable, that knew i

6、ts place. Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource.” The narration of this story is marked by a clear regional identity and shifts in time with a prominent element of retrospectionrevealing the protagonists ambiguous hold of the past, throwing light on the pr

7、esent. The author employs a skillful but natural narrative voice, which effortlessly leads the reader on toward an openand yet conclusive ending. While reading the story, the reader is likely to forget that this is only a fiction and that the protagonist is but a character created by art. The author

8、 succeeds in bridging the gap between art and reality and presenting the fictional character as an acquaintance or even a friend. Thus the reader is apt to identify with the protagonist, feeling what she feels and worrying about what worries her. In this short story the author addressesseveral essen

9、tial problems of everyday life such as friendship and love, marriage and divorce. Once again “Nettles” displays Munros lasting strength that arises from her ability to create an illusorysimplicity that combines the telling of a simple plot and the probing of complicated feelings and subtle meanings

10、of life. Text1. In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunnys house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.2. I have driven around in the hills northeast of Toronto, with my husbandmy second husband, not the one I had l

11、eft behind that summerand I have looked for the house, in an idly persistent way, I have tried to locate the road it was on, but I have never succeeded. It has probably been torn down. Sunny and her husband sold it a few years after I visited them. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to se

12、rve as a convenient summer place. Their children, as they became teenagers, balked at going there. And there was too much upkeep work for JohnstonSunnys husbandwho liked to spend his weekends golfing.（Rewritten as: Years afterward, driving around in the hills northeast of Toronto with another man, I

13、 looked for the house. I tried to locate the road it was on, but I never succeeded. It had probably been torn down. Sunny and her husband sold it a few years after I visited them. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to serve as a convenient summer place. ）I have found the golf courseI thin

14、k it the right one, though the raggedverges have been cleaned up and there is a fancierclubhouse.3. In the countryside where I lived as a child, wells would go dry in the summer. This happened once in about every five or six years, when there was not enough rain. These wells were holes dug in the gr

15、ound. Our well was a deeper hole than most, but we needed a good supply of water for our penned animalsmy father raised silver foxes and minkso one day the well drillerarrived with impressiveequipment, and the hole was extended down, down, deep into the earth until it found the water in the rock. Fr

16、om that time on we could pumpout pure, cold water no matter what the time of year and no matter how dry the weather. That was something to be proud of. There was a tin mug hanging on the pump, and when I drank from it on a burningday, I thought of black rocks where the water ran sparklinglike diamon

17、ds.4. The well drillerhe was sometimes called the well digger, as if nobody could be bothered to be precise about what he did and the older description was the more comfortablewas a man named Mike McCallum. He lived in the town close by our farm but he did not have a house there. He lived in the Cla

18、rk Hotelhe had come there in the spring, and he would stay until he finished up whatever work he found to do in this part of the country. Then he would move on.5. Mike McCallum was a younger man than my father, but he had a son who was a year and two months older than I was. This boy lived with his

19、father（him）in hotel rooms or boardinghouses, wherever his father was working, and he went to whatever school was at hand. His name was Mike McCallum too.I know exactly how old he was because that is something children establish immediately, it is one of the essential matters on which they negotiate

20、whether to be friends or not. He was nine and I was eight. His birthday was in April, mine in June. The summer holidays were well under way when he arrived at our house with his father.6. His father drove a dark-red truck that was always muddy or dusty. Mike and I climbed into the cab when it rained

21、. I dont remember whether his father went into our kitchen then, for a smoke and a cup of tea, or stood under a tree, or went right on working. The rain washed down the windows of the cab and made a racket like stoneson the roof. The smell was of mentheir work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky

22、boots and sour-cheese socks. Also of damp long-haired dog, because we had taken Ranger in with us. I took Ranger for granted, I was used to having him follow me around and sometimes for no good reason I would order him to stay home, go off to the barn, leave me alone. But Mike was fond of him and al

23、ways addressed him kindly and by name, telling him our plans and waiting for him when he took off on one of his dog-projects, chasing a groundhogor a rabbit. Living as he did with his father, Mike could never have a dog of his own.One day when Ranger was with us he chased a skunk, and the skunk turn

24、ed and sprayed him. Mike and I were held to be somewhat to blame. My mother had to stop whatever she was doing and drive into town and get several large tins of tomato juice. Mike persuaded Ranger to get into a tub and we poured the tomato juice over him and brushed it into his hair. It looked as if

25、 we were washing him in blood. How many people would it take to supply that much blood? We wondered. How many horses? Elephants?I had more acquaintance with blood and animal-killing than Mike did. I took him to see the spot in the corner of the pasturenear the barnyardgate where my father shot and b

26、utchered the horses that were fed to the foxes and mink. The ground was trodden bare and appeared to have a deep blood-stain, an iron-red cast to it. Then I took him to the meat-house in the barnyard where the horse carcasseswere hung before being ground up for feed. The meat-house was just a shed w

27、ith wire walls and the walls were black with flies, drunk on the smell of carrion. We got shinglesand smashedthem dead.7. Our farm was smallnine acres. It was small enough for me to have explored every part of it, and every part had a particular look and character, which I could not have put into wo

28、rds. It is easy to see what would be special about the wire shed with the long, pale horse carcasses hung from brutal hooks, or about the trodden blood-soaked ground where they had changed from live horses into those supplies of meat. But there were other things, such as the stones on either side of

29、 the barngangway, that had just as much to say to me, though nothing memorable had ever occurred there. On one side there was a big smooth whitish stone that bulged out and dominatedall the others, and so that side had to me an expansive and public air, and I would always choose to climb that way ra

30、ther than on the other side, where the stones were darker and clung together in a more mean-spirited way. Each of the trees on the place had likewise an attitude and a presencethe elm looked serene and the oak threatening, the maples friendly and workaday, the hawthorn old and crabby. Even the pitso

31、n the river flatswhere my father had sold off several years agohad their distinct character, perhaps easiest to spot if you saw them full of water at the recedingof the spring floods. There was the one that was small and round and deep and perfect; the one that was spread out like a tail; and the on

32、e that was wide and irresolutein shape and always with a chopon it because the water was so shallow.Mike saw all these things from a different angle. And so did I, now that I was with him. I saw them his way and mine, and my way was by its very nature incommunicable, so that it had to stay secret. H

33、is had to do with immediate advantage. The large pale stone in the gangway was for jumping off, taking a short hard run and then launching yourself out into the air, to clearthe smaller stones in the slope beneath and land on the packed earth by the stable door. All the trees were for climbing, but particula