Short Story Writers
"And then I woke up."Thus goes the kind of "trick ending" that every first year writing student is told to avoid, a mark of cheap theatrics and poor craftsmanship.Historically, this kind of ending is often associated with Guy de Maupassant, the prolific French writer of the 19th century, or his 20th century American heir apparent, O. Henry (William S. Porter).In this well researched and at moments insightful book, Richard Fusco argues that Maupassant's bad rap as first and foremost the inventor and disseminator of the "trick ending" is undeserved.What Fusco feels Maupassant does deserve is recognition as perhaps the single most important influence on American short story writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Henry James, and of course O. Henry.However, even as Fusco's readings of these writers are laudable in their thoroughness (with the exception of his treatment of O. Henry), his overall argument seems finally too dependent on an understanding of "trick ending" which does not make necessary distinctions, and is therefore superficial enough to accommodate nearly any writer one cares to name.
Not that Fusco doesn't differentiate between types of trick endings.In fact, he develops his own seven categories of stories--from the simplest (linear) to most complex (sinusoidal)--based on their varying "placement and number of discovery points for the reader."The first two chapters, where Fusco limits himself to a thorough and interesting analysis of narrative structure in Maupassant, are the best of the book.However, in shifting his terms from "trick endings" to "discovery points," Fusco deprives his argument of its specificity and thus its power.
To cite one example: Fusco argues that Maupassant and Bierce were similar in that they "favored fictive structures that depended on last-second, ironic reversals in the reader's perception."He then uses this theorized similarity to compare Maupassant's much-anthologized "The Necklace" to the that of Bierce's equally popular "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."In analyzing these (and other) stories by the two writers, Fusco uses Poe's "unity of effect" as a synonym for "discovery point" (which is in itself too reductionist a reading of what Poe meant).However, unity of effect for Maupassant in "The Necklace" is utterly dependent on information unavailable to the reader, i.e., that the necklace is paste, and thus the reader's "discovery" depends entirely on an absence, a trick of concealment, as in a "bad" murder mystery.In "Owl Creek," on the other hand, one need only read closely in the section where Peyton first falls from the bridge (and, in reality, dies) to obtain all the information necessary to correctly interpret the rest of the story as an hallucination.
Fierstein, Harvey. "On Tidy Endings (1986)." MissyJames, Alan P. Merickel. Reading Literature and Writing Arguments. n.d. 494-504.
Many times in life things are not as they seem. What may look simple on the surface may be more complicated deeper within. Countless authors of short stories go on a journey to intricately craft the ultimate revelation as well as the subtle clues meant for the readers as they attempt to figure out the complete “truth” of the story. The various authors of these stories often use different literary techniques to help uncover the revelation their main characters undergo. Through the process of carefully developing their unique characters and through point of view, both Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway ultimately convey the significant revelation in the short stories, “Roman Fever” and “Hills Like White Elephants” respectively. The use of these two literary techniques is essential because they provide the readers with the necessary clues to realize the ultimate revelations.
The Allies’ victory in WWII marked democracy’s triumph over dictatorship, and the consequences shook Latin America. Questioning why they should support the struggle for democracy in Europe and yet suffer the constraints of dictatorship at home, many Latin Americans rallied to democratize their own political structures. A group of prominent middle–class Brazilians opposed to the continuation of the Vargas dictatorship mused publicly, “If we fight against fascism at the side of the United Nations so that liberty and democracy may be restored to all people, certainly we are not asking too much in demanding for ourselves such rights and guarantees.” The times favored the democratic concepts professed by the middle class. A wave of freedom of speech, press, and assembly engulfed much of Latin America and bathed the middle class with satisfaction. New political parties emerged to represent broader segments of the population. Democracy, always a fragile plant anywhere, seemed ready to blossom throughout Latin America. Nowhere was this change more amply illustrated than in Guatemala, where Jorge Ubico ruled as dictator from 1931 until 1944. Ubico, a former minister of war, carried out unprecedented centralization of the state and repression of his opponents. Although he technically ended debt peonage, the 1934 vagrancy law required the carrying of identification cards and improved ...
end. This essay will further show how both stories shared similar endings, while at the same time
Millard Fillmore was born January 7, 1800 in Summerhill, New York.[1] He was the second child out of 9 kids.[2] He was also the oldest son out of all the 9 kids. He was born and raised on a farm. He worked most of his life. He completed 3 years of school and later stopped going and worked for his family. At the age of 14 he had learned how to make cloth by his father Nathaniel Fillmore in a shop in Sparta, New York.[3] He worked at the cloth-making trades and he worked with various trade shops.[4] He always had a hard time obtaining an education living in the frontier of New Hope, New York.[5] He attended New Hope Academy in New Hope, New York for 6 months in the year 1819 at the age of 19. At the New Hope Academy he met and fell in love with his future wife Abigail Powers.[6] She would later become the first lady. That same year Millard began to study law under Judge Walter wood of Montville. Later on with the cloth-making background he had decided to buy out his cloth-making apprenticeship.[7] He left Judge Walter Wood and traveled to Buffalo, New York to continue to study law under Asa Rice and Joseph Clary.[8] In the year 1823 he was admitted to the bar and began to practice law where he had started sloth-making, East Aurora, New York. There he built a house for him and his future wife Abigail. They started their life together by getting married February 5, 1826;[9] Millard was the age of 26 years old when he got married. After they married ...
Wright, Richard. "The Man Who Was Almost a Man." Literature and the Writing Process. Ed.
In 1961, in response to the success of the Cuba’s Communist Revolution, President John F. Kennedy initiated the Alliance for Progress to discourage Marxist revolutions and to promote economic and social cooperation through democracy between the United States and Latin America . All throughout Latin America during the 1960’s Marxism had become the central philosophy and the future of democracy in the region appeared to be greatly threatened. Chile was viewed by the US as the ideal model for the Alliance for Progress program due its long history of constitutional democracy dating back to the nineteenth century. The Cold War fears of the Communist threat infiltrated the Chilean military when the United States funded a training school called the School of the Americas that specialized in teaching counterinsurgency techniques to Latin American militaries in order to combat guerilla warfare . Throughout these Cold War years the United States’ fear of Communism seemed dominate over rationality causing the US to act against their claimed beliefs in freedom, democracy, and basic human rights. That hypocrisy is most greatly evidenced by the United States foreign policy toward Chile during the 1960’s-the 1990’s.
While the findings suggested the challenges and limits relying on an authoritarian government, American dollars steadily increased their presence in El Salvador, increasing 18 million in investment in 1950 to 31 million in 1959, without much attention to the regime’s governmental style. (___) In El Salvador, the American task was easy, the United States, to encourage stability, defined as limiting insurrections, simply had to support those in power, the military, the landed oligarchy and hence dictators. Nixon, while serving as vice president during the 1955, himself claiming that the question in the Latin American region was, “how far is dictatorship necessary” declared, “we must deal with [Latin American] governments as they are and work over a period of time towards more democracy.” (Ambrose)
Throughout this semester’s stories, I have noticed one common motif in almost every literary work: deeper meaning. Authors whom write shorter stories need to provide hidden meaning in their works to arouse profound thought. Many of these short stories display one of the three ironies such as verbal, situation and dramatic. It can be used to provide plot twists, or even reveal to each reader’s inner bias that they didn’t even realize they had. Another annotation used is glossing. Glossing makes a literary work more complex with hidden significance. Each of the following stories displays at least one of these literary devises which gave each short story a sense of complexity for further analysis and controversy.
When initially asked about the morality of lying, it is easy for one to condemn it for being wrong or even corrupt. However, those asked are generally guilty of the crime on a daily basis. Lying is, unfortunately, a normal aspect of everyday life. In the essay “The Ways We Lie,” author Stephanie Ericsson makes note of the most common types of lies along with their consequences. By ordering the categories from least to most severe, she expresses the idea that lies enshroud our daily lives to the extent that we can no longer between fact and fiction. To fully bring this argument into perspective, Ericsson utilizes metaphor, rhetorical questions, and allusion.
Richard Gunderman asks the question, "Isn 't there something inherently wrong with lying, and “in his article” Is Lying Bad for Us?" Similarly, Stephanie Ericsson states, "Sure I lie, but it doesn 't hurt anything. Or does it?" in her essay, "The Ways We Lie.” Both Gunderman and Ericsson hold strong opinions in regards to lying and they appeal to their audience by incorporating personal experiences as well as references to answer the questions that so many long to confirm.
The first West African state of record was Ghana which had been ruled by over forty kings by the year 300 A.D. The early Ghanaians were a peaceful and prosperous people who developed an economy based on agriculture and...
Grace King's The Little Convent Girl is an excellent example of post-Civil War realism incorporating a trick-ending. In this local color short story, King methodically lures the reader into a false belief that her story is about an insignificant and nameless young girl who, after twelve years seclusion in a convent, is exposed to the fervor and excitement of a steamboat trip down the Mississippi River. The success of Ms. King's trick-ending is achieved through three basic elements; 1) de-emphasizing the importance of the main character, 2) tidbits of information followed by wordy misdirection, and 3) a false climax.
Short stories have particular settings to supplement their themes. The eerie catacombs during a carnival in “The Cask of Amontillado” supplement the themes of revenge, and deception, which the protagonist takes responsibility in; whereas in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the atmosphere around the Spanish train station emphasizes the themes of miscommunication between characters and their evasion of responsibilities.
In “William Wilson”, Edgar Allan Poe teases his readers throughout the entirety of story with hints about its unexpectedly expected conclusion. Through figuratively-infused passages, Poe meticulously leads the reader to the front steps of the story’s ending without ever truly revealing the conclusion until the final sentences. Within those final sentences, the question of who the second William Wilson truly is, is answered, immediately transforming the story from a battle between two physical beings with both the same name and appearance into an internal battle staged within the mind of one man with conflicting desires. In order to create this dramatic and essential shift, Poe externalizes the protagonist’s internal struggle by blurring the