Introduction
When was the last time you devoured a short story? Frankly, we don’t usually find ourselves talking about falling in love with that form the way we do novels. And that’s too bad. Short stories, like their bigger siblings the novel and the novella, are a member of the fiction family, and they’re the perfect thing to read when you have a limited window of time. Short stories compress events and often focus on a single conflict to create a degree of intensity not often seen in novels.
What makes a short story different from a novel is really a matter of length. Short stories are much, much shorter than novels. Some short stories, known as flash fictions, are as brief as a tweet! Still, no matter how constrained the word count, a short story writer uses the same literary elements and techniques as any fiction writer.
By now, you are likely familiar with character, setting, plot, theme, and point-of-view. These elements are integral to any short story, regardless of its style or author. The more you train yourself to see the choices a writer makes when, say, building a character or selecting a point-of-view, the better you’ll be able to appreciate and understand this very digestible form of fiction.
Reading Prose Fiction
The Act of Reading Prose Fiction
The act of reading has been characterised by Robert DiYanni as involving three interrelated processes: experience, interpretation, and evaluation. The first thing we do when we read a novel is to experience it, that is to say, we respond to the development of the narrative and the characters presented to us. The story we read if it does its job effectively affects us on certain levels. We become involved in the events and incidents that befall the characters. The language of the narrative forces us to respond to it, maybe with pleasure or admiration, or sometimes with confusion. If we are engaged by the story on any level we will have feelings one way or the other about the outcome; we will all respond in different ways. That response is shaped by our reaction to the interplay of various narrative elements.
Setting
We can define the ‘setting’ of a story as the geographical location or locations in which the events of the narrative takes place, as well as the time in which those events are set. Location can refer to wider geographical entities such as countries or cities as well as to smaller entities such as households or domestic interiors. Time can refer to a general historical period or to the chronological boundaries of the story’s events.
Let’s look again at the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. How important is setting in this case? How does Rushdie’s narrative style help us to evaluate the significance of the setting?
I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity.
(1981, p. 9)
Did you feel that setting was clearly very important here? We may not know exactly why at this stage, but the implication is that the time and place at which the narrator’s story begins is of great significance. He describes himself as ‘handcuffed to history’ by the circumstances of his birth, and, as I suggested earlier, we are alerted to the possibility of a story to come which will have historical and political associations, reinforced by the assertion that the narrator’s ‘destinies’ were ‘indissolubly chained’ to the future of his country. Location is surely important here; the place of the narrator’s birth is the first thing we are told. You might further have noticed that the specific cultural environment is suggested by the image of ‘Clock-hands join(ing) palms in respectful greeting’, mimicking the Indian gesture of namaste.
The references to ‘soothsayers’, ‘newspapers’ and ‘politicos’ further enhances our sense of a culturally significant environment, where traditional and modern values interact. The American writer Eudora Welty has claimed that ‘every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else’ (quoted in DiYanni, 1997, p. 67). Rushdie’s use of place and time in this extract from Midnight’s Children seems to bear this out; the narrative’s entire meaning and significance rests on its setting, I hope you’ll agree.
The surroundings in which characters are placed and in which narrative events take place can have other, more subtle effects on how we read and interpret stories. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) is another novel rooted very specifically in time and place. Much of the action takes place in various country house settings, which represent different aspects of Russian society at the time. Into that environment comes the anarchist Bazarov, influenced by the ideas he has absorbed in the very different settings of the city and the university. As you will see from your study of the novel, the various settings come to represent different values, ideas and attitudes. This is equally true of smaller scale settings. We associate particular characters with the environments in which we encounter them, and the values associated with those places; characters often seem ‘at home’ in specific places, but not elsewhere. In Great Expectations Joe Gargery is uncomfortable when visiting Miss Havisham at Statis House, and awkward in Pip’s London dwelling. Other characters, like Turgenev’s Bazarov, are characterised by their failure to ‘belong’ in any of the locations they inhabit in the course of the story. Pavel Petrovich, seemingly the antithesis of Bazarov, also often seems ill-at-ease in his surroundings. He lives on the estate of his brother Nikolai, but is not originally from this sort of rural background.
Read the following description of Pavel’s room and try to decide what the setting tells us about him.
But Pavel Petrovich returned to his elegant room, hung with fine dark-grey wallpaper and decorated with guns fixed on a colourful Persian rug, with walnut furniture upholstered in dark-green velveteen, a Renaissance-style bookcase in old dark oak, bronze statuettes on a magnificent desk and a fireplace. He flung himself on his sofa, folded his hands behind his head and remained there motionless, gazing almost with despair at the ceiling. Whether it was that he wanted to hide from the very walls themselves what was happening to his face, or for some other reason, he stood up, undid the loops holding the heavy window curtains and once again flung himself down on the sofa.
(1862, pp. 40–1)
The overall impression given by the very detailed inventory of Pavel’s room is one of a bewildering array of cultural styles and influences, from different times and places. It is undoubtedly the room of someone with a well-developed aesthetic sense, but does it appear at all comfortable or inviting? The very diversity of the décor seems to suggest a sense of rootlessness, reinforced by Pavel’s behaviour here; the possibility that he is trying to ‘hide from the very walls themselves what was happening to his face’. Even in the sanctuary of his own rooms on his brother’s estate he seems to find himself alienated amongst the no doubt impressive, yet strangely soulless artefacts he has gathered around him.
The significance of setting will vary from novel to novel, or from story to story, of course, and one of the questions you should continually ask yourself as you read is how important to the narrative events and characterisation are the dual factors of time and place.
Approaching Prose Fiction. Licensed under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-2.1
Characterisation
How do writers of prose fiction make us respond to the imaginary people they create? In order to encourage us to continue reading writers must force us to react in some way to their characters, whether it is to identify, empathise or sympathise with them, to dislike or disapprove of them, or to pass judgement on their actions, behaviour and values. As we have already seen, the fundamental question we repeatedly ask when we read a story is what happened next. Equally importantly we want to know to whom it happened, and we will only want to know this if we feel strongly, one way or another about the characters in the story. In this respect the author’s skill at characterisation is crucial.
We use the term characterisation to describe the strategies that an author uses to present and develop the characters in a narrative. This use of descriptive techniques will vary from character to character. Some characters are central to a story; often there will be one main character, around whom the narrative revolves: Pip in Great Expectations, for example, or, we may reasonably surmise from the opening paragraph we looked at earlier, Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. We expect that such characters, and others close to the heart of narrative events will be presented to us in great detail; we may be allowed access to their consciousness, either by the use of first-person narration or third-person focalisation, and it is extremely likely that they will undergo some sort of significant personal change (for better or worse) as a result of their experiences. These kinds of characters are sometimes known as dynamic. Other characters, often described as static, may be much less thoroughly-drawn; they may be introduced to the narrative primarily to perform a particular narrative or thematic function, and will probably undergo little or no change in the course of the story.
Another useful distinction between types of characters was proposed by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. ‘We may divide characters into flat and round,’ Forster suggested (1927, p. 65). What do you think he meant by these terms?
I expect you found this rather straightforward. The word ‘flat’ suggests a one-dimensional figure, and what Forster meant by ‘flat’ characters were those who are largely taken to represent a particular idea, human trait or set of values, much like the static characters described above. They are caricatures who can be easily and quickly summarised; Forster gives an example:
The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I will never desert Mr Micawber.” There is Mrs Micawber – she says she won’t desert Mr Micawber; she doesn’t, and there she is.
(ibid.)
The reference is to a character in Dickens’ David Copperfield who does not change in any significant way in spite of the varied experiences she and her family encounter. ‘Round’ characters, by contrast, are described and developed in such a way as to achieve three-dimensionality, a physical and psychological complexity that mimics that of the real people we come to know in our everyday lives.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice provides some interesting examples of ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters. Note, however, that identifying those examples will largely depend on the reader’s response to Austen’s characters, but we might well place figures such as Mrs Bennett in the former category, and the central character, her daughter Elizabeth in the latter. As you may know, Austen sums up Mrs Bennet in three short, direct sentences at the end of the opening chapter of the novel:
She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.
(Austen, 1813, p. 3)
Compare this with the opening of the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice:
Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley and talked of Mrs. Darcy may be guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.
(ibid., p. 295)
These two descriptions of Mrs. Bennet, at the beginning and end of the novel are rare examples of Austen ‘telling’ us about this particular character. More often, she ‘shows’ us Mrs. Bennett by reporting her speech directly and allowing us to draw our own conclusions about Mrs. Bennet’s attitudes and values. We are never given access to Mrs. Bennett’s consciousness; events are never ‘focalised’ through her. Why do you think this is?
It is probably because Mrs. Bennet’s main function in the story is to represent a particular attitude of the period in which the novel is set, that the best, or only chance for women’s social advancement and financial security was through marriage. By representing this view from the outside, as it were, Austen leads us to scrutinise it in a more rigorous way. To describe Mrs. Bennet as ‘flat’ or ‘static’ is not to imply that she is necessarily a negligible character. She may perform only one function in the novel, but it is a function that draws attention to the constrained position of women in the society Austen depicts.
That Elizabeth is a ‘round’, or ‘dynamic’ character is surely not in doubt. The entire novel revolves around her and we perceive much of the action through her eyes. The changes she experiences conform to Forster’s template of ‘roundness’, and the contrast with Mrs. Bennet demonstrates the necessity for combinations of ‘flat’ and ‘round’ that Forster sees as necessary for the successful creation of fictional narrative:
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it – life within the pages of a book. And by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other kind, the novelist achieves his task of acclimatization, and harmonizes the human race with the other aspects of his work.
(Forster, 1927, p. 75)
Approaching Prose Fiction. Licensed under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-2.1
Genre
In The Realist Novel Dennis Walder provides you with an extract from a detective novel to identify, and suggests that you’ll find this relatively easy because it contains certain features that we expect in such a work. In other words, we each have a mental set of expectations that we use to categorise writing.
How would you categorise these extracts, all of which are taken from novels? Think about your reasons for suggesting a particular category.
How did you get on? The first extract is from an historical novel (Dunnett, 1993, p. 11). We can guess that it’s set in the past because the detailed description of Edinburgh doesn’t sound like a modern town. We know it’s from a novel since, in the last paragraph of the extract, we are allowed to share a piece of information that one of the characters has been given: ‘The King’s Wark, Anselm Adorne had been told.’ Anselm Adorne did exist – he was a merchant and magistrate in Bruges in the second half of the fifteenth century – but Edinburgh is described as he sees it, and this we know can only be a fictional reconstruction. This is a good example of what historical novels can do: they can imaginatively recreate the past, peopling it both with characters who really existed and with characters who are completely fictional.
The second extract is from a popular romance (Mortimer, 1980, pp. 12–13). We know this, I think, because of the emphasis on the smouldering sexuality of the male character and the admiring response of the female character to him. They are stereotypes, placed in a stereotypical situation, although it’s perhaps worth pointing out that the male figure has sound literary antecedents in the form of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester, from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre respectively.
The third extract is science fiction (May, 1982, p. 11). We might deduce this from the unfamiliar situation, the use of strange words such as ‘superficies’ and ‘normal space’ and the fact that the Ship is a space ship, surrounded by stars.
I hope you could classify these extracts without too much difficulty, because you were able to draw on concepts of various kinds of fictional writing, based on your knowledge and experience of reading. This is the kind of classification that Dennis Walder summarises on page 9 of The Realist Novel, although he also points out that these classifications are not fixed or rigid.
Approaching Prose Fiction. Licensed under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-2.1
Style and Language
What do we mean when we talk of a particular writer’s style? It might help us to think of style as a way of organising and expressing narrative unique to the writer, as distinctive and personal a characteristic as the writer’s handwriting or the prints on the fingers holding the pen. Just as no two sets of fingerprints are alike, so no two writers are alike. Writers write in a style that reflects their individual view of the world.
The word ‘style’ can generally be used to encompass the various literary devices that authors combine to convey their themes and the content of their narratives. Some of those devices, such as narrative perspectives and the representation of character have already been discussed, so I want to focus here on the language writers use and the effects of that language.
Please read the attached extract from a short story, ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), by Virginia Woolf. How would you characterise the descriptive language Woolf uses here and the way in which she presents the thoughts and speech of her characters?
The descriptive language of the first and final paragraphs is intensely detailed. Various human figures pass by and butterflies flit from flower-bed to flower-bed – a scene we can easily visualise. But Woolf s use of terms such as ‘curiously irregular’ to describe the movement of the humans and ‘zig-zag’ to depict the flight of the butterflies suggests a sense of vagueness and randomness. The change of focus, from the general scene to the positioning and attitudes of a man, a woman – he ‘strolling carelessly’, she moving ‘with greater purpose’ alerts us to anticipate that they will be the subject of what is to follow. Would you agree that there is almost a filmic quality to this narrative description? When I read this I imagine a camera panning across a wide screen before closing in on the two characters. The final paragraph of the extract, which describes how the husband and wife and their children ‘diminished in size […] as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches’ seems to me to suggest a gradually dissolving image, such as we might see when a film deliberately loses focus. In spite of the plethora of detail and description, then, I feel there is nevertheless a somewhat impressionistic feel to Woolf’s scene-setting.
Did you notice how a similar ‘blurring’ effect seems to result from the second paragraph’s shifts, first to the man’s internal consciousness, as we are given access to his thoughts, and then to direct speech right at the end of the paragraph: ‘Tell me, Eleanor, d’you ever think of the past?’ There is only a dash to denote this second shift; on a first reading we may not even notice that Woolf has moved from a depiction of thoughts to the representation of speech.
And what of the conversation between the man and woman? Does this strike you as a naturalistic representation of dialogue? Probably not, I would suggest. There is something artificial and heightened about the woman’s speech in particular:
‘Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees … one’s happiness, one’s reality?’
We might think that no-one would really speak like this, or relate a memory of ‘the mother of all my kisses all my life’ in quite such a mannered fashion. Only with the brisk command to her children – ‘Come Caroline, come Hubert’ – does the woman’s speech appear naturalistic. I think it’s safe to assume that this is not merely bad writing on Woolf’s part; she has chosen her language and her means of representing it for a reason. Indeed, it may seem as though the language itself, rather than the actual narrative, is the main focus of this piece of writing. Woolf was one of a number of authors in the early twentieth-century who sought new ways of writing, challenging the conventions of previous generations that gave a primacy to realistic and naturalistic representation and foregrounded narrative events; stories that had a beginning, middle and end, a strong sense of closure, and a fixed authorial point of view. The narrative, such as it is, of Woolf’s story ‘Kew Gardens’ is episodic rather than linear, and is a good early example of a style of writing that later came to be labelled ‘Modernist’ (James Joyce, whose opening to Portrait of the Artist we looked at earlier was another dominant figure in this movement). We could say, then, that ‘style’ seems to take precedence over subject-matter in writing such as this, and I hope you can see how Woolf’s particular use of language contributes to this.
Now look at another extract; the closing section of a much more recent work, a short story, ‘Gazebo’, by the American writer Raymond Carver. Think again about the questions I asked you to consider before reading the Woolf extract. How does Carver’s style differ from that of Woolf?
The language is minimalist, pared down to the absolute basics, and heavily dialogue-led. We are given no indication of speech intonation; the only verb used to describe the dialogue is the verb ‘to go’, which gives us no clue as to how the words are spoken. This breeds a sense of uncertainty in the reader, I think, and as with Woolf’s elevated tone and language this strategy is deliberate, I would suggest. Although the story is narrated in the first-person I get a strong impression that the narrator, Duane, does not fully understand the situation he is describing: ‘I pray for a sign from Holly. I pray for Holly to show me.’ Similarly, the sparseness of Carver’s writing leaves the reader in a state of uncertainty. Although the dialogue is, I think you’ll agree, much more colloquial and naturalistic than that of Woolf’s characters, there seems to me to be a great deal left unsaid, and a sense that the two characters, while conversing, are not communicating. This is, I would argue, a direct consequence of Carver’s choice of style and language.
Approaching Prose Fiction. Licensed under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-2.1
Summary
Short stories are the perfect form to practice identifying the elements of literature. Any good short story contains characters, including a protagonist or a main character; a setting, which consists of both where the story is set (geographically, say) and when; a plot, that interconnected sequence of events that adds up to something more than just a series of random happenings; a point-of-view, or a perspective from which the story is told; and, finally, themes—in other words, broad ideas or commentaries the writer aims to explore.
Remember that short stories are not just miniature novels. By working with a smaller canvas, so to speak, the short story writer must use language economically and make careful choices about what conflicts their character encounters. Unlike a novel, which may be able to introduce many, many characters over its many, many pages, a short story often works with a smaller cast. The result, however, is not a lesser fictional experience; rather, short stories are often intense in their compression.
