Chapter 17 surprise

Sir Pitt slapped the table and said: "I repeat, I want you. I can't live without you. I didn't realize until after you left. The house is not at all as messy as it used to be. All my accounts All confused again. You must come back! Really come back, dear Becky, come back." Rebecca gasped and replied, "What identity do you take back?" The Baron tightly grasped the hat with the black belt, and replied: "As long as you want, I invite you to come back to be Mrs. Crawley. So you are always satisfied? I want you to be my wife. With your A little cleverness is enough for me. I don't care about family background, I see you as the best lady. Bet smart, the baronet women in the district are not as good as you. Will you? As long as you Just say it."

Rebecca was deeply moved, and said, "Ah, Sir Pitt!" Sir Pitt went on: "Yes, Becky! I am very strong though I am an old man. I have twenty good years to live, and I shall make you happy, see. You You can do whatever you like, spend as much as you like, it’s all up to you, and I’ll give you another injection of money. I follow the rules in everything and never mess around. Look at me!” the old man said, kneeling down, slanting He smiled at Becky winkingly. Rebecca stepped back in surprise.At this point in the story, we haven't seen her panicked yet, but now she can't make up her mind and shed tears.These were probably the most sincere tears in her life.

"Oh, Sir Pitt," said she, "I have been married." Wellcome M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) (translated by Yang Bi) Surprise is part of most narrative fiction.If we could anticipate every twist and turn in the plot, we wouldn't be drawn to the story.Every twist and turn in the plot must therefore be both unpredictable and convincing.Aristotle called this the "conflict of plot," or inversion, that is, a sudden turn of events from one direction to another, often accompanied by a "discovery of the truth," which takes the characters from what they don't know to what they know.An example given by Aristotle is a scene in Oedipus the King in which the messenger, intended to assure the hero of his noble birth, reveals to him instead that he killed his father and married his mother.

When telling a story as world-famous as Oedipus the King, only the characters are amazed, never the audience.For the (audience) audience, the basic moral of this tragedy is irony (see section 39).Yet the novel, unlike all other narrative genres, is (or is supposed to be) telling a whole new story.Therefore, when you read it for the first time, most novels can surprise people, and some novels can give people more feelings besides surprise. Thackeray planted several surprises in this Vanity Fair scene.The penniless governess Becky Sharp, parents dead and penniless, was astonished when the baronet proposed to her; Sir Pitt Crawley and the reader were also taken aback when the lady was reported to have married. married.Thackeray went even further, as Kethlyon Tillawson reveals in The Novel of the 1840s, in this passage at the end of Chapter Fourteen of the novel, in The original serial was placed at the end of the fourth issue, so the first readers were left in suspense (much like audiences of modern soap operas), wondering for a while about the identity of Becky's husband.Thackeray's contemporaries might have imagined the finale of the play, the prodigal son kneeling to propose to the distraught beauty, a typical theatrical scene, and Becky's line: "Alas, Bi Jazz off! I'm already married" is a classical closing line that will keep the audience whispering and chirping until the opening of the next show.

Who exactly Becky married is discussed in the next chapter, but the answer is not immediately given.Miss Crawley, Sir Pitt's half-sister, rushed into the room and saw her brother kneeling in front of Becky (note: what she saw should be Becky kneeling in front of Sir Crawley.——Translator's Note), especially But when she learned that her younger brother's marriage proposal was declined, she was very surprised.Thackeray does not reveal until the end of the chapter that Becky is secretly married to Miss Crawley's nephew, Rawden Crawley, a spendthrift cavalry officer. This effect cannot be achieved without a careful layout.Just like a fireworks display, first a fire twilight is ignited to make it burn slowly, and finally the fire twilight ignites other explosives, causing a series of explosions, resulting in a spectacular scene.Enough other information must be instilled in the reader before the riddle can be solved, so that the answer can be convincing; but too much information cannot be provided, so that the reader can easily solve the riddle by himself.Thackeray keeps some information secret from readers, but this is no deception.In this part, he uses letters extensively to express this implicitness, so as to show that the narrator is going with the flow and paying attention to it.

In the first part of the story, the penniless Becky once tried to trap her good friend Amelia's brother and let him marry her, but unfortunately the plan was thwarted.She had to go to Sir Pitt's house as a tutor to teach his two daughters born to his second wife who was ill in bed.In the country house of the Queen's Crawley, Becky tried her best to be an indispensable figure in the whole family. The mother sister, the rich spinster, also liked her.Miss Crawley was so fascinated with Becky that she was compelled to nurse her when she returned to London ill.Sir Pitt was reluctant to let Becky go, but he was afraid of offending his sister and preventing the two daughters from getting the bequest from their aunt.But as soon as his wife died (to which no one seemed to care much), he made up his mind to get Becky back to Queen's Crawley, at any price, even if it meant marrying her.Miss Crawley saw this early on—though she liked Becky's company, she did not want her in her house—and tacitly encouraged her nephew to seduce Becky, thus eliminating her as a third Crowley. Mrs Laurel's danger.Rawden didn't know it was a trick, but secretly married her. Although this behavior seemed a little reckless to him, it was at least out of sincerity.Other characters do things purely for their own self-interest, and love and death are just chips in the game of wealth and status for them.

Thackeray ruthlessly satirizes all this.Becky was "deeply moved" and shed her most heartfelt tears for the first time in her life - but why?She married the foolish Rawdon, expecting him to inherit her aunt's fortune in the future, only to find that she had missed a bigger and more sure thing: being the wife of a Baron, and he must soon be a wife. The wealthy widow who inherited the title (whose claim he had "twenty good years to live" was too optimistic, and certainly not an advantage at all in Becky's opinion), this scene was caused by Sir Pitt. The portrayal is quite comical, so it is particularly witty.The narrator once commented on this Sir: "All the barons in England, all the nobles and commoners, could never find a more cunning, despicable, selfish, confused, and obscene old man than him." The quotation said He smiled sideways at Becky, and Thackeray hinted at Sir Pitt's naked lust for Becky, as Victorian fashion allowed.And Becky shed tears for not being able to get such a husband. This is a wonderful irony not only for the heroine herself, but also for the whole Vanity Fair society.