更新时间:2013-12-29

sarah • 小冷杉树:是這樣的。。。

Andersen biographer Jackie Wullschlager suggests the tale portrays a certain psychological type (like its author) who cannot be happy in the moment because he expects greater glory just around the corner and then is overwhelmed with regret. The fir-tree, like his creator, is "a fantasist, vain, fearful, restless, afflicted with the trembling sensitivity of the neurotic, manically swinging from hope to misery." By placing the tale in a gentle, nonthreatening domestic setting of silk draperies and comfortable sofas, the tale's fatalistic tone was accepted by the bourgeois adult reader who could identify with the tragic fir-tree's anxious longing and limitless pining.

Andersen had written tales with unhappy endings before ("The Little Mermaid" and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", for example) but a new note was struck with "The Fir-Tree"—a note of "deeply ingrained pessimism, suggesting not only the mercilessness of fate but the pointlessness of life itself, that only the moment is worthwhile." For the first time in his fairy tales, Andersen expressed an existential doubt that his religious beliefs could not allay. Such doubt was touched upon again in later tales such as "Auntie Toothache" and "Old Johanna's Tale". Wullschlager believes the tale is an appropriate complement to Andersen's "The Snowman" of 1861.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fir-Tree