Sarah Cole: A Type Of Love Story

Only One Can Triumph Short stories are a way to escape everyday life without taking all day or week to read the story. They are mainly based on fictional characters and can vary in length. As defined by Dictionary of Literary Terms, a short story is “a relatively short narrative which is designed to produce a single dominant effect and which contains the element of drama. A short story concentrates on a single character in a single situation at a single moment” (343). Like novels, short stories are made up of different plot points such as an exposition, raising action, climax, denouement, and resolution; although, not all short stories accommodate all of these plot points. When a plot point is left out of the story, it tends to leave the
Conflicts make a short story interesting. Without conflict in the exposition of a short story, I would have nothing to fuel the tension and excitement a story creates in my mind, which keeps me reading. A conflict isn’t always an argument, fistfight, or shootout, it can be an internal conflict. In “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” the conflict is man versus himself. Right away Russell Banks writes “I don’t mind describing it now, because I’m a decade older and don’t look the same now as I did then, and Sarah Cole is dead” (76). This shows me the narrator, a man, has struggled telling this story, and only the passing time, along with Sarah Cole’s death is allowing him to get over the inner conflict he has with himself. Further into the story, I can really see how this conflict could affect the short story. Banks’ narrator states his conflict “confuses me, embarrasses me and makes me sad, and consequently I’m likely to tell it falsely” (81). The narrator’s inner conflict is so great, he would jeopardize what truly happened in the story. The struggle shown right away in the exposition, kept my attention and kept me reading to find out if he overcame his embarrassment and
In my mind, it is how every book should be. Full of color and contrast, figuratively speaking of course, it should create the perfect mental picture for a reader so they can truly see how the writer wanted the story to be depicted. Using words to create a mental picture isn’t an easy task, but writers do so using imagery. Dictionary of Literary Terms defines imagery as “the forming of mental images, figures, or likenesses of things; the use of language to represent actions, person, objects, and ideas descriptively” (195). Imagery brings out my imagination and allows me to draw a mental picture in my mind. If I cannot picture what the author is trying to depict, then the story does not make any sense. I like very vivid imagery in a short story, if it is lacking in imagery, I will lose interest quickly and find a different short story. Russell Banks depicts imagery in “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” when describing his characters’ clothing: “He was wearing a navy blue blazer, taupe shirt open at the throat, white slacks, white loafers” (88). The narrator is trying to show how he is attractive and well-dressed unlike Sarah Cole who is unattractive and described as “wearing heavy tan cowboy boots and dark brown suede cowboy hat, lumpy jeans and a yellow T-shirt that clings to her arms, breast and round belly like the skin of a sausage” (78). While reading I could mentally picture the expensive blue blazer, luxurious white slacks and