Средства выразительности используемые автором для достижения юмористического эффекта Джером К. Джером "Три человека в лодке"

Contents
Introduction................................................................................................3
Chapter I
1.1.Distinctive Features of Literary Texts.....................................................6
1.2.Definition of Style..................................................................................7
1.3. Humorous Effect.................................................................................10
Chapter II
Use of Tropes in “Three Men in a Boat” and Humour..................................12
Conclusion..................................................................................................17
Bibliography................................................................................................18

“George fancied that, if it had not been for the restraining influence of the sweet woman at his side, the young man might have given way to violent language.”
Quite an extraordinary pun is formed due to the use of as a sort of stronghold or citadel and a sort of boat that tows another one:
“Another example of the dangerous want of sympathy between tower and towed was witnessed by George and myself once up near Walton. It was where the tow-path shelves gently down into the water, and we were camping on the opposite bank, noticing things in general. By-and-by a small boat came in sight, towed through the water at a tremendous pace by a powerful barge horse, on which sat a very small boy.”
Antithesis is frequently used by Jerome so as to show a great contrast between the people’s expectations and their real experience and inability to challenge even petty hazards of everyday life.
"The river—with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weir's white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory—is a golden fairy stream.
But the river—chill and weary, with the ceaseless rain drops falling on its brown and sluggish waters, with the sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber, while the woods all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts upon the margin, silent ghosts with eyes reproachful like the ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglected—is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets."
The two paragraphs are made into one long span of thought by the signal But and the repetition of the word river after which in both cases a pause is indicated by a dash which suggests a different intonation pattern of the word river. The opposing members of the contrast are the 'sunlight flashing' —'ceaseless rain drops falling'; 'gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths'— 'the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts...'; 'golden fairy stream'—'spirit-haunted water'.
Still there are several things lacking to show a clear case of a stylistic device, viz. the words involved in the opposition do not display any additional nuance of meaning caused by being opposed one to another; there are no true parallel constructions except, perhaps, the general pattern of the two paragraphs, with all the descriptive parts placed between the grammatical subject and predicate, the two predicates serving as a kind of summing up, thus completing the contrast.
'The river... is a golden fairy stream.'—'But the river. .. is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.' The contrast embodied in these two paragraphs is, however, akin to the stylistic device of antithesis.
A poetical passage is invariably followed by ludicrous scene. For example, the author expands on the beauties of the sunset on the river and concludes:
"But we didn't sail into the world of golden sunset: we went slap into that old punt where the gentlemen were fishing."
We have deliberate antithesis, which is a recognized form of humour.
A poetical passage is invariably followed by ludicrous scene. For example, the author expands on the beauties of the sunset on the river and concludes:
"But we didn't sail into the world of golden sunset: we went slap into that old punt where the gentlemen were fishing."
Even phrase epithets are involved in making laugh of the silliness of the humans’ reactions.
"There is a sort of lOh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how- I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and-nobler' expression about Montmorency that has been known to bring the tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen."
The similes do sound ridiculous when the situation can’t be controlled:
“The weather is a thing that is beyond me altogether. I never can understand it. The barometer is useless: it is as misleading as the newspaper forecast.”
Conclusion
Jerome K. Jerome won a wide following with his warm, unsatirical, and unintellectual brand of humor. His Three Men in a Boat was an instant success and clinched his reputation as a humourist. It is all too often assumed that humour is the very effect of a text. But humour is not a perlocutionary effect in its own right, nor is laughter. The humour of a text may be as general a characteristic as a serious text's seriousness. Like serious texts, humorous texts have many different purposes and effects. They can be subdivided into specific subgenres, with their own perlocutionary effects, their own types of laughter (or even other reactions).
Three Men in a Boat is commonly regarded as a comic masterpiece, which is true as far as it goes. The book is often comic, and it is a masterpiece, so therefore it is a comic masterpiece. But Three Men in a Boat is more than that.
Instead of being moral, as writers of his day tried to be, Jerome chose to be adult. He did not encourage the reader to pay homage to a severe moral code which was a poor approximation of the true values of society. Instead he wrote a book in which people have failings and other people forgive them because they realize that they, too, have failings.
The book is in fact primarily a virtuoso display of writing. Jerome used his mastery of style to accomplish a goal which would be considered postmodern in a contemporary book. Three Men in a Boat is full of engagingly written passages in which Jerome persuasively imputes deep significance to mundane events but eventually reveals that he is less than serious. These exercises demonstrate the limited validity of both fictional and non- fictional accounts of human undertakings.
A wide range of various means to provide humour effect serve a target to make fun of trivial situatios usetting most of us. Such figures of speech as pun, irony, zeugma, oxymoron and many others supplement one another to smile at seriousness of quite silly human-beings, who are either devoid of human sense or rely on it quite too often without looking into illusiveness of their fears and dreams.
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Gregory M. and Carroll S. Language and Situation: Language Varieties in their Social Contexts. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
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