Literature Review: Short Story Form & Structure

 *An essay I wrote for school in March 2025.

The postmodern zeitgeist – whether it be in studies of literature, philosophy, or permeating the collective consciousness of internet forums – seems to hold an iron grip on us living in contemporary society. Its champion of experimental form, inherited from its modernist predecessors, is characteristically playful and fragmented with no staple beacon to guide narratives any which way. Despite its ongoing efficacious resonance with audiences, this resistance to readerly closure and guidance toward embracing boundless interpretation through its interest in metafiction and self-reflexivity has recursively led these audiences back to a yearning for the sincere modernist attitudes of past. 

In Allan H. Pasco’s The Short Story: The Short of It, he discusses the effect of the short story genre’s “shortness” – its sole comprehensive defining trait – on authorial intent and readerly response. He argues that the short story’s brevity inhibits its educational ability to build a plausible new world, forcing the author to assume a considerable amount of the reader’s background. This reliance on the audience’s awareness of certain details informs the communication of information between author and reader. My short story Untitled relies upon the reader’s knowledge of contemporary society, specifically its internet culture and resonance with postmodern rhetoric. The world(s) depicted are amalgamations of familiar real world places and cultures to reflect globalisation and the resultant ethnocultural identity confusion. Pasco argues that the genre is “condemned to intensity”, rendering it unable to inspire certain responses from its reader, such as tranquillity or the mundane due the story “quiver[ing] with energy”. Charles Baudelaire argues that this constraint ensures “nothing of the effect of the whole is lost”. The story short’s imposed economy that shuns redundancy and amplification forces the story to rely on hints and its arrangement over repetition or development. This intensity of readerly reception in Untitled is suited to my authorial purpose of inducing conflicted emotional whiplash. The high density of symbols – regardless of their perceived meaningfulness – presented to the alert short story reader overwhelms their capacity for interpretation, encouraging resignation in the formation of meaning.

The literary collage and fragmentation of Donald Barthelme’s flash fiction The School (1974) accentuates the absurdism of modern society. The disconnected string of deaths are told in quick succession with no logical sense of progression. The lack of transition between shifts in narrative focus creates ambiguity in the timing of events, leaving the reader lost and amused with this absence of rationale. This fragmented narration is utilised in Untitled to obscure the story’s sense of time and space in contrast to the boy’s initial narrative which follows a sensical timeline. The School’s literary collage is formed by the reunification of these fragmented pieces into a new, nonlinear narrative through the confused, self-aware narrator of Edgar. This follows his often scatterbrained stream of conscious, employing asides to convey tangents. For example, Edgar interrupts his recount of the deaths of ten parents to inform the audience that he had forgotten about the most bizarre death. This aside’s abrupt introduction and ending frames the event as an afterthought in comparison to the other deaths despite its relatively vivid imagery of a man “who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home”, stoking readerly intrigue which is promptly denied any explanation, emphasising the humorous absurdity of Edgar’s circumstances. This fragmented collage narration is incorporated in Untitled to explore the postmodernist use of humour as a sense-making framework (or the opposite of such) for the intense absurdity of contemporary society.

             The metafictional narration and structure of Clarice Lispector’s short story The Fifth Story (1964) invites interrogation of the interrelation between readerly interpretation and authorial expression. The first person narration addresses the reader directly, announcing her intent to tell three stories as part of a larger narrative, which brings attention to the narrator’s intentionality in the construction of the story. Agnieszka Gabor-da Silva argues that the various iterations of this singular event leaves “neither the reader nor the author … satisfied” as evidenced by the analogy’s abrupt ending, as if the narrator had forsaken her authorial duty to the reader, allowing the non-word to persist beyond the page. This acts as a critique of postmodernist embracement of absolute subjectivity, leaving Lispector, as Nicolino Novello argues, in an “eternal discontentment” with her literary expression, reflected in The Fifth Story’s narrator. Instead of Lispector’s direct acknowledgement of the reader, the metafictional relationship in Untitled is applied to the boy and the girl assuming interchanging roles of the reader and the author as their attempts to resolve and resist against finality on the boy’s story draws attention to the narrative structure of Untitled. This interplay reflects the contention between postmodernist’s submission to the infinity of perspectives and the readerly need for closure and equanimity.

             The subject-object relationship of the hypodiegesis with the diegesis in a story and its implications on narrative freedom and suppression is discussed in Gerald Doherty’s Undercover Stories: Hypodiegetic Narration in James Joyce's "Dubliners". Doherty argues that the paralysis experienced by the characters in James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners is reflected in its truncated, incomplete hypodiegetic stories. The narrators of these stories are unable, or reluctant, to tell these tales, indicated by the use of elision marks […] which hinder these stories’ ability to develop past the enigma in the three-act structure. This disjointed story is contrasted by the diegetic narrative that employs the classic narrative symmetry. In Untitled, the girl’s story isn’t occluded by paralysis. Instead, its deliberate obscuration by the girl herself highlights her narrative control which begins to elude her with the unveiling of details by the hypodiegetic narrators. They resist against her diegetic narrative power by invading the dialogic space; the mechanism which allows her to dominate the narration. Doherty explains that diegetic narrator(s) are able to select and omit, summarise and revise these embedded narratives. This intervention acts as a biased lens through which the reader views the literary world and events, embodying the modernist complexities of the unreliable human psyche. For example, the diegetic narrator of An Encounter mimics a character’s idiolect, seizing narrative control through the appropriation of his narrative. This subjected relationship described by Doherty is manifested in Untitled in the hegemonic narrator of the girl and its hypodiegetic characters. The girl interjects dialogue, offering a cynical interpretation of events while reiterating that this conjecture is “just [her] opinion” which simultaneously depreciates and legitimatises these embedded narratives. This articulation of thought is a rewarding validation for the contemporary reader’s hyperawareness, while also inspiring exasperation at its extreme tongue-and-cheek to investigate the contemporary role of postmodernist attitudes.  

             The experimental form and structure of the modernist and postmodernist short story utilises its nonlinear, fragmented narration, metafictional techniques, and multilevel structure to interrogate the nature of storytelling and readership in their shared embracement of phenomenology. The concision defining the short story spotlights this relationship through the reader’s sensitivity to the intentionality of story elements and arrangement. Untitled contributes to the field of the short fiction through its utilisation of the playful postmodern form to critique its surrender to meaninglessness. Its metafictional elements spur questions about the role of the author and the reader and consequences of abandoning these duties and presuming insincerity on literature and the wider social context.

Bibliography

Barthelme D. (1974). The School. Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories (LOA, 2021), pages 467–70. First published in the June 17, 1974, issue of The New Yorker. https://neenahlibrary.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/combinepdf-4_0.pdf

Doherty, G. (1992). Undercover Stories: Hypodiegetic Narration in James Joyce’s “Dubliners.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, 22(1), 35–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225346

Lispector C. (1964). The Fifth Story (“A quinta historia”). The Foreign Legion (“A legião estrangeira”).

Pasco, A. H. (1993). The Short Story: The Short of It. Style, 27(3), 442–451. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946063