Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

         Last week, I learned about Wuthering Heights written by Emily Bronte.  At the first time, I could hardly understand what’s going in the story, and what I only could find was there is something dark image through the whole story I read.  Many difficult and complex words used in the story make it hard to understand the meaning.  I think some reasons about this including what I learned in the class.  Firstly, story is going between two unfriendly men and it is difficult for them to communicate smoothly with each other.  To describe how difficult it is to relate with the two men, the author used such incomprehensive words.  Secondly, the author used difficult words to show an object of readers.  As in Japanese literature, easy words are used in picture books for children, and complicated words are used in stories for adult.  Writing words that children cannot understand, the author showed who should read this book.  That’s my opinion about this question.

              Since CAPTER 1 is dark and not changing dramatically, I’m wondering how this story is going next and how this story ends.  But the story seems so hard that it will take me very long time to read and understand whole the story.

The Rule of Three

       The last class, we learned about “the rule of three”.  This rule is sometimes used in stories written in English and is effective on making sentence powerful.  In Japanese, this rule is often used in proverbs.  I searched examples of this rule in Japanese.

1.     Pine, bamboo and plum

These words mean ranks of things.  Pine is the lowest, bamboo is the middle and plum is the highest rank.  These are seen in Japanese style hotels’ or first class Japanese restaurant’s names of rooms.

2.    Earthquake, Thunder, Fire and Father

This word is an exception of the rule of three.  This is a Japanese proverb and lists some of things which are thought the most terrible.  There are some opinions about the last word, “father”.  For example, this word had changed gradually from a word meaning typhoon.

3.    Food, clothing and shelter

This word’s meaning is the most important things to live.  It is said that if even one of them is not satisfied our lives, our life cannot be regard as a happy life.  So, we should try to pay attention to those three things in our life.

Besides those, there are many other examples of the rule of three.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

　　　　　Last day, I learned about “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wild.  I had known Oscar Wild before, but I read his story for the first time.  He wrote many stories like “The Happy Prince” and “Salome”.  Though I don’t know about these stories, I know only the titles.  What I thought reading chapter one of the story, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is dark image whole the story.

              In the chapter one, his writing is very skillful.  As I learned in Integrated Skills class, there are some sentences which have similar structure: for example, “there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which were worse”.  I felt it was even very difficult for people whose mother tongue is English to write such a skillful sentence.

              In this story, he wrote interesting comments about beauty.  For example, “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.  Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”  In his other works, he left so many interesting words that there are some Web pages about his quotes.  The most impressive quote is “fashion is what one wears oneself.  What unfashionable is what other people wear” (An Ideal Husband).  Besides this, I found many interesting words which I can never come upon.