Short Story

I

Introduction

Short Story, fictional work depicting one character’s inner conflict or conflict with others, usually having one thematic focus. Short stories generally produce a single, focused emotional and intellectual response in the reader. Novels, by contrast, usually depict conflicts among many characters developed through a variety of episodes, stimulating a complexity of responses in the reader. The short story form ranges from “short shorts,” which run in length from a sentence to four pages, to novellas that can easily be 100 pages long and exhibit characteristics of both the short story and the novel. Because some works straddle the definitional lines of these three forms of fiction—short story, novella, and novel—the terms should be regarded as approximate rather than absolute.

Distinctions should be made between short tales and the modern short story as it is usually regarded. Short tales go back to the origins of human speech, and some were written down by the Egyptians as long ago as 2000 bc. They usually dramatize a simple subject and theme and emphasize narrative over characterization; the opposite is true of the modern short story, where characterization, mood, style, and language are often more important than the narrative itself. Distinctions should also be made between commercial and literary fiction within the short story genre. From O. Henry to Stephen King, commercial short fiction has traditionally featured predictable plot formulas, stock characters and conflicts, and superficial treatment of themes. Literary short fiction employs complex techniques to depict the often-unresolvable dilemmas of the human predicament.

II

Elements of the Short Story

The basic elements of the short story include setting (time and place), conflict, character, and theme. Most stories are set in present day, but settings of place vary from rural to urban and exotic to mundane. The reader follows the main character (or protagonist) in a conflict with another character (or antagonist) or in an internal conflict with some antagonistic psychological or spiritual force. Characters range from familiar stereotypes, such as the aggressive businessman and the lonely housewife, to archetypal characters, such as the rebel, the scapegoat, the alter ego, and those engaged in some sort of search.

The subject of a short story is often mistaken for its theme. Common subjects for modern short fiction include race, ethnic status, gender, class, and social issues such as poverty, drugs, violence, and divorce. These subjects allow the writer to comment upon the larger theme that is the heart of the fictional work. Some of the major themes of 20th-century short stories, as well as longer forms of fiction, are human isolation, alienation, and personal trauma, such as anxiety; love and hate; male-female relationships; family and the conflict of generations; initiation from innocence to experience; friendship and brotherhood; illusion and reality; self-delusion and self-discovery; the individual in conflict with society’s institutions; mortality; spiritual struggles; and even the relationship between life and art.

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III

Art of the Short Story

The art of the short story employs the techniques of point of view, style, plot and structure, and a wide range of devices that stimulate emotional, imaginative, and intellectual responses in the reader. The writer’s choice and control of these techniques determines the reader’s overall experience.

A

Point of View

The three basic point-of-view techniques are omniscient (the all-knowing author narrates), first person (the author lets one of his characters narrate), and central intelligence (the author filters the narrative through the perceptions of a single character). A seldom-used point-of-view technique is the objective (the author poses as a purely objective observer, never giving the reader access to a character’s thoughts), as in “The Secret Room” (1962) by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, in which the author grimly describes a painting that depicts a murder.

American expatriate writer Henry James developed a number of theories about fiction that influenced generations of short-story writers, including Irish writer James Joyce, British short-story specialist Katherine Mansfield, and Americans John O’Hara, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, and John Cheever. In “The Art of Fiction,” a magazine article published in 1884, James described a new type of point of view, third-person central intelligence, in which all the elements of a story are filtered through the perceptions, emotions, imagination, and thoughts of the main character. This view conveys a sense of immediacy and psychological realism, as in James’s own brilliant story, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903). Joyce’s innovations with point of view and style helped change the course of literature in the 20th century with a single book of short stories, Dubliners (1914). These stories offer painfully truthful representations of life in Joyce’s native city using a technique from painting called impressionism, which conveys a fleeting emotional or intellectual perception of the world.

Among early forms of first-person point-of-view narration are epistolary (letters), diary, and memoir (another first-person format—the journal entry—is relatively recent). In the 1879 story “A Bundle of Letters,” Henry James experimented with the epistolary point of view by presenting the story through a series of letters written by six persons living in a French boarding house. Interior monologue (author focuses on a character’s thoughts) and dramatic monologue (author lets the character speak to one or more identified or unidentified listeners) are other forms of first-person point of view, although these are not very common. The first-person narrator is usually identified but can be anonymous, and even ambiguous as to gender, as in the story “Termitary” (1974) by South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Usually a single character narrates, but sometimes there are as many as ten (as in “Just Like a Tree” by Ernest Gaines, 1962), or even nonhuman characters (as in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “Hook,” 1941). Readers often mistake the statements of a first-person narrator for those of the author, who frequently creates an unreliable narrator with ironic results.

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