Short Stories Notes
 Fiction – shaping or counterfeiting; purpose is to see yourself (“fictio” is the
real word)
 Literary fiction – requires reader involvement
 Pulp fiction – lit. made for mass consumption
 Types:
 Fable – moral
 Tale – Old English = “talu” (speech)
 Tall tale – exaggerated story
 Fairy tale – involves magic
Plot
 Plot – the unraveling of the dramatic situation or conflict
 Conflict – a clash of ideas, actions, wills, desires, etc.
 Man v. man
 Man v. self
 Man v. nature
 Man v. society
 Man v. God/fate
 Plot arrangement
 Typical plot arrangement:
 Exposition – opening portion of the story in which characters,
setting, and background info are given; intro to conflict
 Suspense – pleasurable anxiety
 Foreshadowing (not necessary) – preview to what’s coming
 Flashback (not necessary) – looking back
 Crisis – moment of high tension
 Climax – movement of highest tension; turning point
 Denouement – unraveling of the plot, resolution of conflict
 In Medias Res – starts in the middle
 Chronological
 Flashback – whole plot is flashback
 2 types of plot:
 Rite of passage – movement from one stage of life to another
 Epiphany – moment of sudden insight or realization
Point of View
 First person – the narrator tells the story using first person pronouns (I, we,
us, our, my, etc.)
 Major character could tell story
 Minor character could tell story
 Third person – the narrator tells the story using third person pronouns (they,
he, she, etc)
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Omniscient – all seeing, all knowing
Limited omniscient – knows and sees all about only one character
Objective – fly on the wall; sees all, doesn’t know all; external
Editorial omniscience – all seeing/knowing, also expresses a view
Naive/innocent narrator (1st person) – Huckleberry Finn, Scout in To
Kill a Mockingbird; doesn’t really understand what’s going on
Unreliable narrator – takes ideas/facts from other characters; rumor,
gossip
Stream of consciousness – random thoughts
Interior monologue – scripted words with one person’s thoughts
interspersed
Setting
 Time and place of the story
 Locale – physical environment (specific, such as what’s on the coffee
table)
 Time – decade, century, season, day, time, passage of time (time
frame/period)
 Other elements – weather, clothing
 Purposes
 Evoke atmosphere
 Reveal character – setting is often alike to character(s)
 Symbol
 Reveals tone (authors attitude)
 Reveals theme (universal truth)
Character
 Methods of characterization
 Direct – author shows/tells straight out through exposition what the
character is like (i.e.: the girls in “A&P”)
 Indirect – character is shown in action, and readers infer what the
character is like from that action (i.e.: the characters in “The Storm”)
 Types of characters
 Three types:
 Flat – one-dimensional, easily described, limited to one or two
traits
 Round – multi-dimensional, hard to analyze/summarize
 Stock/stereotype – has appeared so often in literature that
readers immediately recognize the type
 Aspects of types:
 Static – same at end of text as at the beginning
 Dynamic – undergoes some sort of permanent change
 Believability:
 Consistent – can’t behave one way in a situation and a different
way in another
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Motivated – readers want to understand why characters do what
they do, especially if there’s a change
 Plausible – lifelike; the character can’t be too good or too bad or
an odd combination of both
 Change
 Within the possibilities of the character
 Sufficiently motivated by the action
 Sufficient time for the change to take place
 Names often reflect character
 Anti-hero – in post-modern literature; ordinary, 20th century citizen who is
frustrated, mocked, confused
 Gratuitous act – action without cause/motivation
Tone
 Tone – author’s attitude toward his audience, his subject matter, and himself
as revealed through the work; emotional coloring of the work (i.e.: angry,
frustrated, surprised, bemused unfulfilled, pathos [pathetic])
 Mood – feeling the reader gets
 Look for tone in word choice, character’s response, setting
Style
 Style – the individual traits/characteristics of a piece; the author’s way of
managing words that seems habitual or customary
 Language/word choice – connotative or denotative, abstract or
concrete, dialect
 Setting and characters
 Structure/syntax – sentence structure, repetition, dashes
 Use of imagery – show instead of tell
 Patterns of sound – alliteration, rhyme, consonance, assonance
 Figurative speech – simile, metaphor, personification
Irony
 Irony – any matter of discrepancy
 Three major types:
 Verbal – discrepancy between what is said and what is meant
o Sarcasm – verbal irony with a tinge of mockery
 Dramatic – discrepancy between what the character says/thinks
and what the reader knows to be true
 Situational – discrepancy between anticipation/expectation and
reality (what we expect is not what we get)
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Other types:
 Point of view – discrepancy between narrator and author
 Cosmic – fate causes discrepancy
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Theme
 Theme – the underlying generalization about life in a story
 Can be stated in one sentence
 Should be universal, never story-specific
 Sometimes reflected in the title
 Never cliché
 Never moralistic
Symbol
 Symbol – thing that suggests more than the literal
 Allegory – story with a meaning beneath the surface meaning
 Symbolic act – gesture of larger that usual significance
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