I Want to Know Why
Probably this American short story is not as popular as Dickens' David Copperfield, yet it also enjoys great fame in the present world. It is coincident that Anderson also gives his readers the shadow of the world through the eyes of a child. One of the different things between the two stories is that Anderson uses the first person for his book. The hero of the story, is a particular townsboy in his teenageŠ15. He loves horses because "they are charming, clean, powerful and honest and reliable". He loves black people, too, as "they are industrious and capable and more reasonable than the whites in dealing with the kids". He expects to live in a widely open and clean world with the smell of earth and grass and the people there being honest, quick, capable and emotional. However, what he saw was quite to the opposite side of his dream. The boy saw with his own eyes that his coach, whom was so respected by the boy, hung around with an ugly-looking and bad woman in a bad-smelled place where people always spoke obscene language. The boy was then badly s
Anderson succeeds in making his readers to believe that the boy spoke at random, nothing refined with work of art. He likes very much to write about the change of mind in a short moment as is not easy to obtain, the fitful life like dreamland and people's pursuit and exploring . He is so interested in describing people's mind through the actual life. Therefore , Anderson give up the traditional structure of a novel and turns towards a new way to romance an atmosphere, a mood, a place, a people , a dream, with his good imagination and clairvoyance. There is always an opening sentence in each paragraph, playing the role of linking or summarizing, e. The fascination of I Want to Know Why is that the whole story is the boy's words. All these sentences or phrases are like the repeating elements playing the role of inner unity and thus they keep the whole story from being incompact. He doesn't follow the traditional method of writing a people as a good one or a bad one; he doesn't keep the traditional way for the end of a story that tells the happy get-together or unhappy parting. tricken by what he had seen and he wanted very much to know the reason. He likes to observe some small people in a small shop, hence to show the other side of American social life, where people are always ill-minded and perplexed and alarmed. Anderson is taken as a signpost for modern American novels because of not only the above-mentioned personal characteristics, but also some other features. As to him, it's more important for a writer to show what people think about .
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