毛姆短篇小说《无所不知先生》读后感

Analysis of Mr. Know All

Abstract：W. Somerset Maugham was a well-known British novelist dramatist and essayist. Mr. Know All is one of his excellent short stories. This article tells mainly what had happened in Maugham’s short story Mr. Know All, the analyses of the main characters as well as the theme of the story and the techniques used by the author in creating the story.

Key words: W. Somerset Maugham, human nature, demerit, bias, first impression

摘要：威廉·萨默塞特·毛姆，英国著名小说家、戏剧家和散文家。《无所不知先生》是其出色的短篇小说之一。这篇文章主要从人物性格、主题以及写作手法方面对这篇小说进行分析。

关键词：威廉·萨默塞特·毛姆人性弱点偏见第一印象

Mr. Know All is a famous short story by W. Somerset Maugham who was a famous British. His short stories mainly portrayed the British people’s life domestic and overseas. The ideas of escaping of the Western modern civilization and rebuilding of spiritual home, the pursuit of freedom and spiritual redemption found their vivid expression in most of his works. In the story Mr. Know All, the author created some figures full of flesh and blood by the vivid description of appearances, words and the unexpected plot. Like the narrator, Mr. Kelade and Mr. Ramsay. Through these remarkable distinctive figures he criticized the arrogance, vanity and selfishness in the human nature, specifically the narrator’s bia s and Mr. Kelade’s conceit and vulgarity. Additionally, he expressed the eagerness of Mr. Kelade to search for a sense of belonging.

The story mainly tells about narrator’s experience on an on a ocean going liner sailing from America to Japan on the Pacific Ocean. The narrator had to share a cabin with a stranger Max Kelada who was not a British as the narrator had expected him to be despite he indeed has a British passport. The reason why h e didn’t like Kelade was because in narrator’s eyes, he was talkative and conceited. He seemed to know everything and was involved in everything. No wonder he was disliked by everybody else on the ship. One evening during the dinner time, Mr. Kelada had a bet of a hundred dollar with Mr. Ramsay. He was quite sure that Mrs. Ramsay’s necklace was made by real pearls yet he claimed that he had made a

mistake. He was mocked by other people. While the next morning, Mr. Kelada received a note of a hundred, through which the narrator founded out that Mr. Kelada lost the wager deliberately because he knew that Mrs. Ramsay’s pearl necklace was brought by her lover and didn’t want to broke a family. At the end of the story, people may found that Mr. Kelada actually has some merits with him. Anyway he was a businessman who got very good personalities. He would rather lose his face and admit that he was wrong than tell Mr. Ramsay that his wife’s necklace was a real one. Thus the narrator’s prejudice against Mr. Kelade has disappeared.

The narrator thought that he himself as a British was superior to those who were not British. He felt quite proud of his British nationality and behaved as a gentleman. At the very beginning, a biased and uneasy atmosphere reigned on this story, because the narrator said that he was prepared to dislike Max Kelada even before he knew him. As he has mentioned, “It was bad enough to share a cabin for fourteen days with anyone but I should have looked upon it with less dismay if my fellow passenger’s name had been Smith or Brown.” He thought that anyone who add ressed a stranger should add a “mister” just as an English gentleman did. He took several examples to prove that how dislikable a person Mr. Kelada was. In the story he said, “I did not like Mr. Kelada. I not only shared a cabin with him and ate three meals a day at the same table, but I could not walk round the deck without his joining me. It was impossible to snub him. It never occurred to him that he was not wanted. He was certain that you were as glad to see him as he was to see you. In your house you might have kicked him down the stairs and slammed the door in his without the suspicion dawning on him that he was not a welcome guest.”

Mr. Kelada was labeled a person of loquacity by the narrator, people may say it was just the narrator’s prejudice agains t him and they tried to examine Mr. Kelada with objectiveness. However from his behavior and words, people could found that he really didn’t leave people a good impression. He was chatty, arrogance and vanity. But as Jim Carrey once said in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004), “Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.”For the most times, he was just expressing rather than communicating. It was irony enough that with all his loquacity, had never told anyone what his business was. He can know everyone on board in three days, yet most people disliked him and didn’t want to