Short Stories Essay Research Paper Short stories

Short Stories Essay, Research Paper

Short stories are made up mainly of plot, setting and character. It is essential that one predominates- if the story deals with action, then the plot must be emphasised, and the characters remain simple figures within it. If the story deals with setting, then character and action must both have significance, but only in relation to the setting. If the story deals with character, then the characters must be emphasised and the plot focus on their most striking features and experiences. The portrayal of these experiences, if effective, can be applied to the reader.s own life experiences, helping them to understand them and their cause, therefor exploring ideas and views of human experience.

Literature, of course, makes explicit its relationship with narrative as a mode of analysis. And in the broad field of communications the structure of linear narrative drives theories of both interpersonal communication and media studies (Fisher 1985; Lucaites & Condit, 1985). That is to say that the interpretation of both media content and the way we relate to others is understood in terms of narrative construct. For instance, in their landmark book on the pragmatics of communication Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson (1967) discuss how each member of a communication situation constructs the event’s story and how these constructions may differ from person to person. Fiske and Hartley (1978), in another anchor text on understanding television, also discuss how television is contextualized as a cultural storyteller.

The characteristics of narrative have informed the content of the dominant media of this culture for some time. After a brief initial period during which the limits of the technology were being tested, film rapidly became a story telling medium. The same was true of much of early radio. Television, of course, has taken the narrative form to new heights (some might say depths) with soap operas, situation comedies, and dramas. Even program formats not immediately perceived as narratives demonstrate our cultural need to contextualize reality in this manner. Both talk shows and news shows are popular according to how interesting they are able to make the stories they tell. Before these electric media were our primary source of entertainment, traditional print was our constant narrative companion. Linear narrative form structures most of the important institutions in this culture, from politics and religion to education and commerce. These are all examples of narrative in its highly linear structure. Linearity and sequentiality, characteristics associated with print force, or request, an audience to attend in a particular way. Non-linear possibilities cracks open the relationship between user and text. Culturally familiar narrative at this point is linear. All narrative, however, does not unfold in this way. Recent trends show narrative taking on a distinctly non-linear shape.

A narrative is an ordered sequence of events. There are (at least) two different ways of ordering the events of a narrative, as we saw above–by strict chronology (”story”) and by the way the events unfold as they are told (”plot”). A narrative may seem to be like real life, for several reasons–because of the attempt to tell a story that seems as if it might have happened, which we call realism, and because, however unreal or surreal a story might be, we live and dream in stories, so they remind us of ourselves in any case.

But narratives are not, essentially, like real life. Narratives are highly edited and rigidly unified, defined, ordered, controlled, and selected. Some of this editing and unifying takes place as a result of the various conventions that apply between the story and the audience. Our appetite for narratives varies considerably, but most people prefer narratives in which only (apparently) essential details are given. Stringing out every action, every thought, every real or potential motivation or consequence is not possible, and not, strictly speaking, a narrative; most of that stuff is edited out, as we recognise when Sancho Panza tells Don Quixote a story, in Cervantes’ comic masterpiece, which is itself a profound exploration of the role of storytelling in our lives. Everything in a narrative (seems to/ought to) belong there. The most obvious ordering and defining of the narrative occurs in the three-part structure of beginnings, middles, and endings. (As noted by Aristotle.)

This is obviously one of the ways in which our lives conform with narrative structure–and vice versa. We are born (and narratives begin), we live our lives (and narratives unfold) and we die (and narratives come to an end). The differences are significant, of course. Narratives are structured so that sequence of chronological events which are determined by the laws of nature and of the world (albeit the fictional world) created in the story plays against the sequence of events as it unfolds in the plot, as told or performed. The order of things in the plot is the order of things we as readers or audience get to see and experience things. To put it another way, our lives are only a story, with one thing happening after another. A narrative is a story and a plot, with events arranged and re-arranged according to some design. If our lives were a plot, they would have to be narrated by some one or some thing.

In standard compositional terms,