An Initial Approach To The Writing Methods In O'Henry's Novels

O' Henry is one of the most famous American short novel writers in the early 20th century. In his legendary life, he spread most parts of the America, from the village to the metropolis, nearly experienced all of the joyful and the misery in the world, witnessed people's living condition at various social levels, and extremely paid attention to the lower level civilian's living condition. It can be said that, these life circumstances have embodied O' Henry's character and spirits as a writer, also just like character disposition and the artistic image in his novel, filling with the contradiction and complication. This kind of psychological disposition, distinctively projects with appears to in his creation, thus has formed its unique artistic character and the creation style. This kind of psychological disposition also caused O'Henry to be out of the ordinary, makes his novel fresh, mysterious, nimble, instable, poetic and unique.O' Henry used to describe a big thing in a slightly way, criticized the social reality by displaying the macroscopic appearance with the microscopic reflection. His critical spear mainly pointed directly to the capitalism world's miniature --the big city in the eastern US. He sympathized with lower people in the deeper level of the society for their unfortunate and bitter experience, and deeply loved their moral excellence, while he hated the upper classes of society with their exploitation and cruelty, exposed their merciless and the ugliness. His novel's human nature subject has profoundly embodied in this promulgates - praising for the beauty and criticizing the ugliness in human nature,The domestic scholars have studied O' Henry novels quite comprehensively, but the research to the opening of his novel is very few. Actually, O' Henry novels pay attention to "the beginning" as much as "the ending". O' Henry novels' opening is extremely diverse, also occupy the extremely important status in his novels. Some beginnings pave the way for the latter parts, some are "analogy and symbol", some are extremely frank, but actually powerful. Comparing with the beginning, O' Henry's skill to deal with the ending is already very well. For instance, "the focusing" is unique in his novel. Certainly, we cannot only look at the ending and neglect the whole, because the success of his ending is based on the upholstery of the whole text, we need to carefully examine its artistic feature in the ending from the entire angle. It needs us further to carefully examine the event occurrence and the development way in his novel. His novels are often written with two clues of the apparent and shadow alternately.The language also embodies his artistic feature in O' Henry novels. He likes to use humorous, charming and humorous language to serve for the comedy image in his novels, to entertain the readers, and to make the readers awaken the intrinsic and serious thought from the funny and laughing description. In addition, O' Henry's character simple description, the succinct dialogue and his usage of analogy is quite evident in his novels.O' Henry, Chekhov and Maupassant are "the three kings of the world short stories", and their short stories are characterized with their fine, beauty and significance, and they enhance short story arts to the unprecedented region. But their novels also have respective artistic features. Comparing with Chekhov, O' Henry displays even more to society's critique contains, has even more the subjective sentiments. In the language usage, O' Henry is more vividly than Chekhov. Compared with Maupassant's naturalism, O' Henry representative is the realism.O' Henry had offered the innumerable artistic novels for the readers in its short life by his uniquely "O' Henry's technique". But "O' Henry's technique" is a big magic weapon which this artistic master makes his great success, also leave us a huge wealth. The paper wish to discuss the bright individuality and the artistic characteristic of O' Henry novels and its new aesthetic field of vision which provides for the readers by elaborating the structure, language, character and the relations among the novels.