Human Quality In A Short Story

While reading a short story, the reader is given the chance to see a world within the text. A story can vary from simple to complex and, as a result, we can see a tiny or large detailed world like we have never seen. No matter the level, every story will contain a human quality based on times, places, languages, and cultures installed in the story. To be able to find that human quality, the reader must find in the story and characters what is familiar and unfamiliar. As Human we experience life a little different from one and another because we each have our own identities that made up of different features. The same idea goes with our authors and their stories, they each lived in different languages, places, and times that is also reflected

We interpret the stories based on what we find familiar and unfamiliar or we take details from the stories and connect them to our experiences and lives. Even if we cannot understand the story as a whole, we can still take the unfamiliar and dissect it until we format into something familiar. To find the familiarly in a story we must start with the language. The first step for a reader to read the text. However, some stories were originally written in other languages so if we want to read the story we have to translate into a language we understand. Beyond translating the actual language, we also have to translate the diction we are given. For example, in Colette’s short story “The Other Wife” as the character Marc orders a meal containing of “The shrimp,” “eggs and bacon”, “cold chicken with a romaine salad”, “Fromage blanc”, “The

In a sense, the characters are the best example of general human quality in a story, for, they are the actors that assist us with making the story come to life. Since these characters are the closest thing we have to human, then we compare them to humans we find in our lives. Even if the characters are from a different place or time, we can still identify the characters based on how human they act. For example Mathilde, the character from Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”, is introduces as being “one of those pretty and charming girls, born by a blunder of destiny in a family of employees” (Page 269). From this small piece of information, we see Mathilde as not just a character set in late 1800s France but as a beautiful girl who is born below her intended rank. Some readers may like or hate Mathilde based her actions in the story but the fact that we are judging her is when we have that familiar human