ハーディのユーモア : 「惑える牧師」の言語表現(2)

This paper is the sequel to the former one, “Hardy’s Humour － Linguistic
Characteristics in ‘The Distracted Preacher (1) － .” ‘The Distracted Preacher’ (1879)
in Wessex Tales (1888) by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is quite an interesting ‘long
short story’ in terms of humour and narrative techniques. This story was welcomed as
‘capital trifle, light and amusing’ and ‘irresistibly comic’ when published. Hardy is
still now regarded rather fixedly as a writer of tragic and pessimistic novels, stories
and poems. This conventional image of Hardy is at once blown away if we read this
comical story. Hardy started writing novels with an acute critical eye on the society of
class consciousness, and, therefore, his works are in a sense full of satirical and
ironical treatment of the then society and its system. One of his earliest novels,
however, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), whose title is from the song in the Wood
of Arden in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It (1599), is a pastoral novel with tint
of pathos and humour. Hardy was as an ambitious writer with keen consciousness of narrative techniques and seems to have tried every mode of narrative including
humour, which element is as it were an undercurrent even in tragic novels like Tess of
the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896).
Focusing on Hardy’s humour might have the possibility of changing the quality of
his novels and stories, and would contribute to a reevaluation of his writings in general.
In this paper, ‘The Distracted Preacher’ is discussed and analyzed from the point of
humour and narrative technique with the attention to linguistic characteristics in the
story.