This question is incomplete; here´s the complete question.
Read Abalone, Abalone, Abalone, by Toshio Mori
Why does the author describe the extent to which the narrator is puzzled by mr. abe’s collecting?
Why does the author describe the extent to which the narrator is puzzled by Mr. Abe’s collecting?
A. To give insight into the narrator’s culture
B. To explain the narrator’s relationship with Mr. Abe
C. To establish the narrator as unreliable.
D. To make the narrator’s later shift in understanding more significant
Answer: D. To make the narrator’s later shift in understanding more significant
Explanation:
At first, the narrator highlights how much he´s intrigued about why would Mr. Abe keep collecting and polishing abalone shells since his front porch was practically full of them already. This initial mystery becomes more significant when the narrator finds an abalone shell, understands the reason for that practice, and starts a collection of his own.
<em>“The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”</em>
