ハーディのユーモア感覚 : 「羊飼いが見たもの」に見られるユーモア

'What the Shepherd Saw' (1881) in A Changed Man, The Waiting Supper and Other Tales (1913) by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is kind of a Christmas story like Charles Dickens's well-known Christmas stories. This story is certainly a weird one about a scary murder committed and witnessed on some part of Wessex downs. With well-constructed structure and calculated foreshadowing, this story is an excellent one in terms of narrative techniques. Furthermore, this story contains some kind of humour in the tense scenes.
Hardy is still now regarded rather fixedly as a writer of tragic and pessimistic novels, stories and poems. This conventional image of Hardy is put in doubt if we read this story carefully. Hardy started writing novels with an acute critical eye on the society of class consciousness and on Christian religion; therefore, his works are in a sense full of satirical and ironical treatment of the then society and its system, and the religious state of mind of the people at that time. 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 some tint pathos and humour. Hardy was as an ambitious writer with a keen consciousness of narrative techniques and seems to have tried every mode of narratives including humour, which element is as it were an undercurrent even in the most tragic novels like Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896).
Focusing on Hardy's sense of humour might lead us to be aware of the hidden quality of humour in his novels and stories, and would contribute to a reevaluation of his writings in general. In this paper, 'What the Shepherd Saw' is discussed and analyzed from the point of Hardy's sense of humour and narrative techniques with the attention to linguistic characteristics in the story.