Chapter 38 Chapter etc.

Chapter two I grew up—my relatives hated me—sent me to school—grandpa didn’t care about me—teacher abused me—adversity accompanied me—I formed a party for selfishness and plotted against my teacher—don’t let me see grandpa—was chased and killed by grandpa’s heir—I knocked knocked out his guardian's teeth. Tobias Smellet The Adventures of Roderick Langdon (1748) chapter Ten Climbing two flights of stairs turned into two chapters, isn't it a bit of a fuss?Don't tell me that we have just climbed to the landing of the first flight of stairs, and there are still fifteen steps below: Dad and uncle are having a good time talking, and maybe climbing one step will turn into a lucky story.Readers, what can I do?Just resign to fate and let it go.I suddenly had a plan: put down the curtain, Xiang Di.I lowered the curtain.Draw a line across the paper, Tristram.I paddled.

Well, this chapter ends and the next one begins. Since I always like to follow the rules, if there are any rules and regulations that must be followed this time, let him go to hell!I'd ball it up and tear it up and throw it in the fire.How is it, is it warm?Yes, indeed.Isn't this also a good material!Should people obey the rules, or should the rules obey people? Lawrence Sterne, Shandy (1759-67) chapter eight Even if King Arthur's throne be my new bed, I don't pass the time on it either. St. Anton's ancient well shall be my cup, Because my lover no longer cares about me.

"Ancient Tune" Sir Walter Scott The Heart of Midlothian (1818) Chapter One I can't get anything done.Because as a woman, My eyes just stay in front of me. A Maiden's Tragedy by Beaumont and Bletcher George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72) ... She has the right to pursue happiness.Frank would take her in his arms and hold her tight.Frank will save her. She stood among the moving crowd at North Street Station.He holds her hand.She knew he was talking to her, talking about the journey over and over again. James Joyce (1914) People tend to think that the division of a novel into chapters is perfectly natural, as if it were as natural and inevitable as the division of discourse into sentences and paragraphs.Far from it.For example, the novels of Daniel Defoe are early British works.His novels are written in one go from beginning to end, without chapters.It is not clear whether his practice is due to his lack of literary accomplishment, or whether he deliberately imitates the tone of untrained and simple narrators, allowing them to pour their life experiences into the book without any conception or structure. .Whatever the reason, this technique creates a lot of trouble for the reader and creates a sense of confusion.For example, it is difficult for readers to trace the itinerary of Moore Friend, his partners and children, and it is difficult to go back and verify each one.

Dividing a long text into several small units has several advantages.It can bring the narrative to a halt and give the reader a chance to catch their breath.For this reason, the division into chapters allows the whole event to be coherent in time and place.I have long noticed how Thackeray uses the last line of every chapter, like the last line of every act on the stage, for suspense and surprise (see §15). E. M. Forster employs a similar technique in the passage quoted in the second section of this book.Beginning a new chapter also has a proven expressive or rhetorical function.It would be better if each chapter had a title, or a quote, or a general summary of what the chapter was about.The titles of Smellet's chapters, just like movie commercials, whet the reader's appetite for thrilling scenes.In a sense, they "leaked" the general outline of the story to the reader ahead of time, but not so specific that the reader lost interest.These titles express the full flavor of Smellett's novels: lively, fast-paced, and full of scenes of violence.

Generally speaking, the closer the novelist is to reality, the less he will pay attention to the chapter structure of the novel.On the contrary, those novelists who think they are advanced specialize in this and make fuss.When the word "chapter" is mentioned, people can't help but think of the chapter layout of the novel.We have already mentioned how Lawrence Sterne uses this to introduce the narrated person into the play.This is done by having Tristram accuse his female reader of "how absent-minded she was in reading the last chapter." (See Section 17 for details.) Four volumes.Here the narrator describes a conversation between his father and Uncle Toby on the day he was born.In a more traditional novel, such dialogue would never be divided into two chapters.Stern, on the other hand, uses the chatteriness of his characters as an excuse to write a new chapter wherever he wants, in defiance of the "normal laws" of creation.In fact, it's also "my chapter about chapters, and it's a chapter that's bound to end before I go to sleep." On this, he concludes, "Chapters give the brain a rest, it helps or Imposition of imagination. Moreover, in such a work full of dramatic characters, the division of chapters is as indispensable as the change of scene." The advantage of this is to reduce the "cold and artificial elements" in the work.He recommends the reader to research Longines. "If the first reading doesn't inspire you, don't be afraid to read it again." As in Shandy, this section about chapters is long but meaningful.

Sir Walter Scott was good at quoting a poem at the beginning of each chapter as the introductory speech, which created a generation of fashion.Generally speaking, this quotation often comes from ancient ballads, and collecting ancient ballads is the author's strong point.Citations serve different functions.One of the functions is Point Questions.For example, the lines before the fourth chapter of "The Heart of Midlothian" are quoted from "Ancient Tune", which is closely related to a main plot in the book.Effie Dians, the sister of the main character, Jenny Dians, is accused of murdering her illegitimate son.The poem quoted from "Ancient Tune" links her situation with the situation of traditional women who are repeatedly seduced and then abandoned by their lovers.The poem mentions "Arthur's Seat" (a hill overlooking Edinburgh) and "St. Anton's Ancient Well", limiting the theme to a specific background, which is one of Scott's main intentions and also his The main reason to appeal to contemporary readers.An overall effect of these quotations is to establish in people's minds the image of the author as a 'know-it-all', a trustworthy 'guide' as far as Scottish history, culture and geography are concerned.

This creative technique became popular in the nineteenth century and was widely imitated. George Eliot is a good example.Most of her citations, however, come from established authors, if not very famous.As in Middlemarch, she first quotes lines from Elizabethan writers Beaumont and Fletcher before introducing the character Dorothea Brooke.Due to her gender, Dorocia was unable to realize her ideal.Her frustration was reinforced by the citation.It also reinforced the impression that George Eliot wanted to give people, that she was a knowledgeable author, as intellectually as any man. The poems that George Eliot sometimes quotes from are anonymous poems.In fact, these poems are often written by her personally.Kipling took this practice to the extreme.There is a long quotation before the "Mrs. Bathurst" mentioned in the seventh section.The author indicated that it was quoted from an "old script", but it was actually written by Kipling himself.In imitation of the dramatic prose style of the seventeenth century, this work describes the death of a courtier or jester.Although this passage is very difficult to understand, it contains important clues, which are very useful for understanding the main theme of the story. "She cursed him to death, but she didn't know that she did it, otherwise she wouldn't do it if she was killed." This seems to rule out the possibility that the second body found next to Vickery is Mrs. Bathurst sex.

Of course, Mrs Bathurst has no chapters to speak of.Short stories are rarely divided into chapters, and some only occasionally use blank lines to indicate pauses or breaks in the text.For example, James Joyce's novels mainly describe the thought process of the protagonist sitting in front of his window before eloping with his seaman lover.The novel is then disconnected by an asterisk.Another part begins: "She stands among the moving crowd at North Street Station." The break in the text moves the scene from the home to the wharf, where the novel's climax is located.The author doesn't describe how Evelyn got there, because that's irrelevant to the story.

A novel can be divided into several parts by various means, such as "volume", "section", numbered chapters, numbered or unnumbered subsections, etc.Some writers obviously attach great importance to this, and do everything possible to achieve formal symmetry.For example, Henry Fielding's novel "Tom Jones" has a total of 198 chapters and is divided into 18 parts.The first six are set in the countryside, the middle six are on the road, and the last six are in London.The manner in which a novel is published and distributed at a given time directly affects this aspect of the novel.For example, in the 19th century, a novel was generally printed in three volumes, mainly to facilitate the circulation of libraries, because the library could lend a novel to three readers at the same time.This ethos also encouraged writers to divide their novels into three parts.For example, readers can easily divide Jane Austen's novel into three parts.Many novels of the Victorian era were published in volumes or serials, either in separate paperbacks or serially in magazines.This practice must eventually affect the form of the novel.Dickens's novel Hard Times was written for a weekly magazine, so each chapter is not too long.His novel and Bleak House were written for a monthly magazine, so their chapters are obviously longer than the aforementioned works.Moreover, the length of novels serialized in magazines often has strict uniform requirements.

It seems that this problem includes two aspects.One is to divide the novel into several parts simply from the perspective of space or layout.This often provides a clue to the overall structure or layout of the novel.At the same time, this also has a certain impact on the speed and rhythm of readers reading novels.This structural symmetry is analogous to stanzas in poetry.On the other hand, it is meaningful, that is, to deepen people's understanding of meaning through the titles and quotations of chapters, so that the original text has meaning and sound outside the words.Looking back on my own creative experience, I found that this is reflected in very different ways in novels of different nature.If it weren't for writing this article, I would have forgotten that my debut novel "Cinema" has no chapters.The book is divided into three parts, which are numbered separately, and each part is about what happened in a weekend.In each part, it is divided into several plots, which are respectively represented by blank lines or asterisks to show the difference.I think this form is entirely determined by the nature of the novel.Because the scenes in the novel are changed frequently, the characters in the novel are also different because of the different scenes, although the time when things happen is the same.The blank line between the plot and the plot is similar to the "lens switching" in the movie.My first chapter-marked novel was The British Museum Is Collapsing.This is a comedy novel, which contains a lot of "imitations" of other works, and the writing is quite fluent.At the beginning of each chapter there is a witty quotation about the reading room of the British Museum, and the sources of the quotations are all officially published books and periodicals.Its purpose is to imitate and satirize the actions of "acid literati". "Transposition" is divided into six parts, each of which is numbered and has a title, namely "Flight", "Settlement", "Response", "Reading", "Exchange" and "End". "How far can you go? "is also divided into several chapters accordingly, and the title of each chapter has the word "how": "What happened?" "How did they lose their virginity?" "How did they lose their fear of hell?" ?"etc.This repetition of words is intentional. The first purpose is to make the titles of each chapter feel symmetrical in semantics, and the second is to make up for the unequal number of words in the titles of each chapter.I think that symmetry is so important to a writer that it goes far beyond the average blasphemer.