Reading a short story closely

Unity of effect and economy

Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales gives the oldest critical tool still in common use. He argued that a skilful writer conceives a certain unique or single effect first and then devises incidents to bring it about. For a reader, the practical question follows: what does each detail, line of dialogue or change of scene contribute to the whole? A passage that serves no purpose in the design is, on Poe's terms, a fault.^[1]

Poe's phrasing is strict: he wrote that no word should be written whose tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. This is a description of an ideal and not a law. A reference work records that Chekhov opposed the view of the story as a finished product of art, so Poe's test is not universal. It remains useful as a way of asking readers to notice what the author chose to include.^[1][2]

Economy and omission

A related idea is economy, which concerns what a story leaves out. Ernest Hemingway set out his iceberg image in Death in the Afternoon (1932), writing that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The argument is that a writer who knows the subject well can omit things, and a reader will still sense them. A writer who omits what he does not know leaves hollow places in the writing.^[3]

Economy can also be a matter of style and training. The reference article on Maupassant records that Flaubert mentored him and shaped his concise, measured prose. When reading closely, the useful habit is to ask what has been implied and not stated, such as an unspoken quarrel or an unnamed cause, and to check whether the surface details of the story support that inference.^[4]

Point of view

Point of view is the position from which a story is told. In first-person narration the narrator is part of the story and refers to themselves as I or me, which the reference article says creates a close relationship between narrator and reader. In third-person limited narration the narrator uses he or she but is confined to one character's perspective. An omniscient narrator sees and knows everything that happens, including characters' thoughts, and is associated with nineteenth-century novelists such as Dickens, Tolstoy and Eliot.^[5]

Narration may also be unreliable. An unreliable narrator is usually a first-person narrator, though a third-person narrator may also be unreliable; the article cites J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield as an example. The theorist Gerard Genette is named for the terms intradiegetic and extradiegetic, which the article links to the distinction between first-person and third-person narrative. A reader can test any story by asking who is speaking, what that person can know, and what they might want to conceal.^[5]

The turn or epiphany

Many stories pivot on a moment of recognition. James Joyce supplied the best-known term for it. In Stephen Hero, his character Stephen Daedalus defines an epiphany as a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in speech, gesture or a memorable phase of the mind. Joyce borrowed the Christian term and introduced it to preface a discussion of Aquinas's criteria of beauty, in which an object that seems radiant achieves its epiphany.^[6]

Critics apply the idea to Joyce's own collection Dubliners (1914). The reference article identifies five stories in which the device appears, each with a character reaching a self-realisation at the end: An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, A Little Cloud and The Dead. The concept is a critical lens, not a requirement of the form, and it should be applied with care to stories whose endings do not turn on any single moment.^[6]

Endings, open and closed

An ending can resolve a plot or leave it open, and critics have defended both. The reference work on the short story records Maugham's preference for a definite design with a plot and Chekhov's slice of life, in which a story should have neither a beginning nor an end. It adds that Chekhov does not round off the end of his stories but leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.^[2]

Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice adds a social reading. His submerged population group names people left on the margins of society, and many critics regard the book as the first lengthy study of the short story as a form. Readers can ask whether an open ending reflects a character's unresolved position, which is an interpretation to be argued from the text and not a point settled by any of the critics named here.^[7]