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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.

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GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE
The Gift of the Magi
“The Gift of the Magi,” one of the best-known American short stories, was hurriedly composed in a few hours after its deadline had already passed. Celebrated American short-story writer William Sydney Porter, known by his pseudonym, O. Henry, wrote the story for New York Sunday World magazine in 1905. It was published in 1906 in a collection of his short stories, The Four Million. The story contains Porter’s characteristic ironic plot twists and surprise ending, and is set in New York City, Porter’s home from 1901 until his death in 1910. The city was a common backdrop for his stories. Today Porter is memorialized in the O. Henry Awards for short stories. These stories have been published annually in anthologies since 1918. open sidebar

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

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GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE
Why I Live at the P.O.
The novels and short stories of American writer Eudora Welty have come to epitomize modern Southern storytelling. A lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty brings her characters to life through vivid language and speech patterns, and her deftly portrayed situations often center around family circumstances and relationships. “Why I Live at the P.O.” was published in Welty’s 1941 short-story collection A Curtain of Green. open sidebar

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.

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

Henry James
James Joyce

Henry James
American author Henry James moved to Europe while in his thirties, settling in England in 1876. As a result many of his novels, shorter fiction, and essays probe the contrasts between America and Europe. His style of writing became more and more complex throughout his career, and is distinguished by its rich psychological characterization and deceptively uncomplicated plots.
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James Joyce
The novels and short stories of James Joyce are distinguished by their keen psychological insight and use of literary innovations, most notably the stream of consciousness technique. The stories in Dubliners, his only collection of short fiction, are generally regarded as models of the genre.
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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.

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield
British author Katherine Mansfield is best known for her short stories. These stories display sensitivity to emotion by giving attention to the inner conflicts of the characters. Mansfield’s style was influenced by that of Russian author Anton Chekhov.
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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.

John O’Hara

John O’Hara
American writer John O’Hara sold 225 short stories to The New Yorker magazine, more than any other writer. He also wrote several novels, including Ten North Frederick (1955), winner of the 1956 National Book Award for fiction.
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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.

B. Style

Style is the author’s careful choice of words and arrangement of words, sentences, and paragraphs to produce a specific effect on the reader. An author’s style evolves out of the chosen point-of-view technique. The omniscient point of view produces a relatively complex style; the first-person point of view results in a simple style if it is recorded as “spoken,” more complex if written; and central intelligence generates a style that typically is slightly elevated above the intelligence level of the focal character. The simple, economical style of American Ernest Hemingway and his selection of images reveal subtle shifts in his characters’ psychological states. Hemingway’s style was particularly effective first-person narration, as in the famous opening paragraph of the 1927 story “In Another Country”:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

C. Plot and Structure

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant
The 19th-century French author Guy de Maupassant is deemed one of the greatest short-story writers of all time. Known for its realism, simplicity, and directness, Maupassant’s fiction addresses the theme of human cruelty and incorporates his observations on French society. In addition to his more than 200 short stories, Maupassant also wrote travel sketches and six novels.
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There is a wide range of plot forms and structures found in the short story. A traditional plot has a beginning (introduction of the problem), middle (development of the problem), and an end (resolution of the problem). Some writers venture into less predictable plots, such as Canadian Margaret Atwood in her “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (1983) which is seemingly plotless but deliberately divided into 13 brief episodes. Some authors complicate the structure of their plots with the use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; with a frame that encloses the story (a story within a story); or with subplots (secondary storylines) or double plots (two or more equally important narratives progressing simultaneously, usually converging at the end). Among other devices that enhance plot structure are foreshadowing, reversals of fortune, digressions, abrupt transitions, and juxtapositions of contrasting characters or settings.

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"The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant
Nineteenth-century French writer Guy de Maupassant, a master of the short story, became one of the most popular writers in France during his lifetime. His view of the world was ultimately grim, and many of his short stories end with a cruel twist. In “La parure” (“The Necklace”), first published in 1884, the reader is left to judge whether fate or pride leads to tragedy for Madame Loisel, a woman who yearns for a more affluent lifestyle. open sidebar

Deliberate ambiguity (open-endedness), as opposed to unambiguous resolutions (closed-endedness), is a plot feature of many modern stories. The surprise endings of French author Guy de Maupassant, as in his 1884 story “The Necklace,” influenced many commercial writers but also some literary ones. At the turn of the century, American author O. Henry became famous for his paradoxical style and surprise endings, such as in “A Gift of the Magi” (1905). American writer William Faulkner used the surprise ending to complex and serious effect in “A Rose for Emily” (1931).

D. Devices

Writers employ a wide range of rhetorical devices for contrast and emphasis, including paradox, metaphor, patterns of imagery, repeated motifs, symbolism, and irony. The power of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Flowering Judas” (1930) derives in part from her overt use of symbolism. Irony provides the reader with a contrast between reality and the fallibility of human perception, which is at the heart of most modern fiction. American writer Flannery O’Connor is a master of irony, as in the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) in which a manipulative grandmother imposes her will on a situation, with the ironic result that she and her family are killed by escaped convicts.

IV. STORY TYPES