Understanding the Art of the Short Story
A short story is a concise narrative that captivates readers with a focused theme and structured plot. This literary form demands unity of purpose and a single informing idea, distinguishing it from a novel. Various perspectives exist on the composition of a short story, with debates on its length, structure, and narrative scope. From Poe's advocacy for suggestive slices of life to Maugham's preference for a complete narrative arc, the essence of a well-crafted short story lies in its ability to engage and resonate within limited confines.
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LITERARY FORMS- THE SHORT STORY A.Rajamani, Assistant Professor of English, Hajee Karutha Rowther Howdia College, Uthamapalayam
A short story may be defined as a story that can be read at a single setting Edgar Allen Poe considered it as a prose narrative requiring from half an hour to one or two hours in its perusal The brevity is one of the essential characteristics of a short story However, it is not merely a novel on a reduced scale It has a distinct, well-marked organisational structure different from that of a novel
The theme of a short story must be one that can effectively be developed within the prescribed limits The story should impress the reader as clear in outline and well proportioned It should not give the impression of crowding This does not mean that the story must necessarily be confined to a single incident
It only means that even when the story covers a wide field of time and large sequence of events, it should give a concentration of interest Most of the stories of Maupassant and Washington Irving s famous story Rip Van Winkle illustrate this point
A short story should have unity which means unity of purpose, of motive, of action and of impression A short story should contain only one informing idea and it should be worked out with singleness of purpose No scattering of attention is allowed in a short story as it may be allowed in a novel
Writers and critics hold different opinions on the art of the short story Edgar Allen Poe thought that a short story should present only a slice of life suggestively It should have neither a beginning nor an end However, the modern story writer and novelist Somerset Maugham thinks that a short story should be a finished product of art with a beginning, a middle and an end
Another critic compares the short story with a horse race in which the start and the finish count most Such contradictory definitions are more or less reconciled in what Hugh Walpole says A short story should be a story, a record of things happening, full of incident and accident, swift movement, unexpected development reacting through a suspense to a climax and satisfying denouement
A short may deal with any motive and material Poe s story Gold Bug turns on a puzzle whereas Stockton s The Lady and the Tiger is contrived to give a dramatic surprise at the end Most stories of O Henry are interesting because of their unexpected surprise endings Short stories of Chekhov, Maupassant, Tolstoy and Hemingway illustrate the wide variety of themes and motives that can be successfully employed by a short story writer
W.H. Hudson says: A dramatic incident or situation; a telling scene; a closely coordinated series of events; a phase of character; a bit of experience; an aspect of life; a moral problem-any of these, and innumerable other motives which might be added to the list, may be made the nucleus of a thoroughly satisfactory story .
R.L. Stevenson speaks of three kinds of short stories the story of plot, the story of character and the story of impression However, to most story writers, the idea of a story comes something like an abstract thought or impression and later they work it up into the shape of a story inventing the required plot, character and incidents
