Writing a Critical Analysis of a Short Story

To write an effective critical analysis, you must first be sure that you understand the question
that has been posed, and all literary terms that you have been asked to address. Once you feel
you understand the question, reread the piece of literature, making notes. Then look at the
notes you've made, consider what connections you can make between observations, and
reconsider the question. Try to formulate a rough thesis statement (your "claim"). Now try to
select those pieces of evidence that you feel you can most convincingly use to support the
claim you made. Next, try to formulate a good introduction, that

 names the work discussed and the author.

 provides a very brief plot summary.
 relates some aspect of that plot to the topic you have chosen to address.
 provides a thesis statement.
 indicates the way you plan to develop your argument (support your claim).

Now proceed to introduce and discuss the evidence you mentioned in your introduction, in
the order in which you mentioned it. Ensure that you deal with each kind of evidence in a
paragraph of its own, and that you introduce the topic of each paragraph with a carefully-
focused topic sentence. Also ensure that you end each paragraph with a concluding sentence
that sums up the thrust of that paragraph's argument and possibly paves the way for the next
piece of evidence to be discussed. (Alternatively, you can begin the next paragraph with a
transitional phrase that links the new piece of evidence with the one you have just
summarized.)

Finally, write a conclusion that restates your thesis (but using different words), incorporates a
brief restatement of your key evidence, and provides a sense of closure. A good closing
technique is to somehow link the claim you have made about this particular piece of literature
with the author's general style or preoccupations, or to suggest some way in which the topic
you have just discussed relates more generally to some aspect of human existence.

Model Essay
What follows is the sample essay analysing the use of setting in the short story "The Cask of
Amontillado." Both "good" and "poor" examples of the essay's first and second body
paragraphs are included. As you read each paragraph of the essay, beginning with its
introduction, clicking on the "continue" arrow at the bottom of the paragraph will permit you
to see commentary on particular features of the essay-writing process. To see all the
commentary, you may need to click the arrow multiple times.

 Introduction
 Body Paragraph #1 (good)
 Body Paragraph #1 (poor)
 Body Paragraph #2 (good)
 Body Paragraph #2 (poor)
 Body Paragraph #3
 Conclusion
Short story
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For the Gershwin piano and violin music, see Short Story (music).

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The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the
subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page.

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format.
This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in the
20th and 21st century sense) and novels or books. Short story definitions based upon length
differ somewhat even among professional writers, due somewhat in part to the fragmentation
of the medium into genres. Since the short story format includes a wide range of genres and
styles, the actual length is determined by the individual author's preference (or the story's
actual needs in terms of creative trajectory or story arc) and the submission guidelines
relevant to the story's actual market. Guidelines vary greatly among publishers.

Many short story writers define their work through a combination of creative, personal
expression and artistic integrity. As a result, many attempt to resist categorization by genre as
well as definition by numbers, finding such approaches limiting and counter-intuitive to
artistic form and reasoning. As a result, definitions of the short story based upon length
splinter even more when the writing process is taken into consideration.

Contents
[hide]

 1 Overview
 2 Characteristics
 3 Length
 4 History
o 4.1 Origins
o 4.2 Modern times
o 4.3 The post-war era
 5 See also
 6 References & Further Reading
 7 Notes
 8 External links

[edit] Overview
Short stories have their face in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly
sketched situation that quickly comes to its point. With the rise of the comparatively realistic
novel, the short story evolved as a miniature version, with some of its first perfectly
independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Other nineteenth-century writers well
known for their short stories include Nikolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, and Bolesław Prus.
Some authors are known almost entirely for their short stories, either by choice (they wrote
nothing else) or by critical regard (short-story writing is thought of as a challenging art). An
example is Jorge Luis Borges, who won American fame with "The Garden of Forking Paths",
published in the August 1948 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Another example is O.
Henry (author of "Gift of the Magi"), for whom the O. Henry Award is named. American
examples include Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.

Authors such as Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Virginia Woolf,
Bolesław Prus, Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, P.G.
Wodehouse and Ernest Hemingway were highly accomplished writers of both short stories
and novels.

Short stories have often been adapted for half-hour and hour radio dramas, as on NBC
Presents: Short Story (1951–52).
The art of story telling is doubtlessly older than record of civilization. Even the so-called
modern short story, which was the latest of the major literary types to evolve, has an ancient
lineage. Perhaps the oldest and most direct ancestor of the short story is the anecdote and
illustrative story, straight to the point. The ancient parable and fable, starkly brief narrative
used to enforce some moral or spiritual truth, anticipate the severe brevity and unity of some
short stories written today

[edit] Characteristics
Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one
incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a small number of characters, and covers a short
period of time. It can be boiled down to "Man goes up tree. Man gets rocks thrown at him.
Man goes down tree."

In longer forms of fiction, stories tend to contain certain core elements of dramatic structure:
exposition (the introduction of setting, situation and main characters); complication (the event
that introduces the conflict); rising action, crisis (the decisive moment for the protagonist and
his commitment to a course of action); climax (the point of highest interest in terms of the
conflict and the point with the most action); resolution (the point when the conflict is
resolved); and moral.

Because of their length, short stories may or may not follow this pattern. Some do not follow
patterns at all. For example, modern short stories only occasionally have an exposition. More
typical, though, is an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action (in
medias res). As with longer stories, plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning
point. However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may or may not
have a moral or practical lesson. As with any art form, the exact characteristics of a short
story will vary by creator.

When short stories intend to convey a specific ethical or moral perspective, they fall into a
more specific sub-category called Parables (or Fables). This specific kind of short story has
been used by spiritual and religious leaders worldwide to inspire, enlighten, and educate their
followers.

[edit] Length
See the article novella for related debate about length.

Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic.
A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point
most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846).
Other definitions place the maximum word length at anywhere from 7,000 to 9,000 words.
As a point of reference for the science fiction genre writer, the Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers of America defines short story length in its Nebula Awards for science fiction
submission guidelines as having a word count of less than 7,500.[1] In contemporary usage,
the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words and no
shorter than 1,000. Stories with less than 1,000 words are sometimes referred to as "short
short stories",[2] or "flash fiction" if they are shorter than 750 words.
[edit] History
[edit] Origins

Short stories date back to oral story-telling traditions which originally produced epics such as
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or
rhythmic verse, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets.
Such stylistic devices often acted as mnemonics for easier recall, rendition and adaptation of
the story. Short sections of verse might focus on individual narratives that could be told at
one sitting. The overall arc of the tale would emerge only through the telling of multiple such
sections.

Fables, succinct tales with an explicit "moral," were said by the Greek historian Herodotus to
have been invented in the 6th century BCE by a Greek slave named Aesop, though other
times and nationalities have also been given for him. These ancient fables are today known as
Aesop's Fables.

The other ancient form of short story, the anecdote, was popular under the Roman Empire.
Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point.
Many surviving Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th or 14th century as the Gesta
Romanorum. Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the
fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley were published.

In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in the early
14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni
Boccaccio's Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which
range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger
narrative story (a frame story), although the frame tale device was not adopted by all writers.
At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the
darkly tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation).

The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle",
by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional fairy tales began to be
published (one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault). The appearance of
Antoine Galland's first modern translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian
Nights) (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710–12) would have an enormous
influence on the 18th century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.

[edit] Modern times

Examples of the earlier form of short fiction, the tale, include the Brothers Grimm's Fairy
Tales (1824–26) and Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–32). The first
examples of tales that would help in the emerging process of a modern short story in the
United States are Charles Brockden Brown's "Somnambulism" (1805), Washington Irving's
Rip van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of
the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842).

In the latter 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong demand
for short fiction of between 3,000 and 15,000 words. Famous short stories of this period
include Bolesław Prus's "A Legend of Old Egypt" (1888) and Anton Chekhov's "Ward No. 6"
(1892).

At the same time, the first literary theories about the short story appeared. A widely known
one is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). In 1901, Brander
Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published "The Philosophy of
the Short-Story". At that same year, Matthews was the first one to name the emerging genre
"short story".

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of high-profile magazines such as The Atlantic
Monthly, Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post published short stories in each issue. The
demand for quality short stories was so great and the money paid for such so high that F.
Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to short-story(as Matthews preferred to write it) writing to
pay his numerous debts.

[edit] The post-war era

The period following World War II saw a great flowering of literary short fiction in the
United States. The New Yorker continued to publish the works of the form’s leading mid-
century practitioners, including Shirley Jackson, whose story, “The Lottery,” published in
1948, elicited the strongest response in the magazine’s history to that time. Other frequent
contributors during the last 1940s included John Cheever, John Steinbeck, Jean Stafford and
Eudora Welty. J. D. Salinger's “Nine Stories” (1953) experimented with point of view and
voice, while Flannery O’Connor's “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1955) reinvigorated the
Southern Gothic style. When Life magazine published Ernest Hemingway's long short story
(or novella) The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the issue containing this story sold 5,300,000
copies in only two days.

Cultural and social identity played a considerable role in much of the short fiction of the
1960s. Philip Roth and Grace Paley cultivated distinctive Jewish-American voices. Tillie
Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” adopted a consciously feminist perspective. James Baldwin’s
“Going to Meet the Man” told stories of African-American life. Frank O’Connor’s “The
Lonely Voice,” a classic exploration of the short story, appeared in 1963. The 1970s saw the
rise of the post-modern short story in the works of Donald Barthelme and John Barth. The
same decade witnessed the establishment of the Pushcart Press, which, under the leadership
of Bill Henderson, began publishing the best of the independent and small presses.

Minimalism gained widespread influence in the 1980s, most notably in the work of Raymond
Carver, Ann Beattie and Bobbi Ann Mason. However, traditionalists including John Updike
and Joyce Carol Oates maintained significant influence on the form, as did Canadian author
Alice Munro. John Gardner’s seminal reference text, “The Art of Fiction”, appeared in 1983.

Many of the American short stories of the 1990s feature magical realism. Among the leading
practitioners in this style were Steven Millhauser and Robert Olen Butler. Stuart Dybek
gained prominence for his depictions of life in Chicago's Polish neighborhoods and Tim
O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried" tackled the legacy of the Vietnam War. Louise Erdrich
wrote poignantly of Native American life. T. C. Boyle and David Foster Wallace explored
the psychology of popular culture.
The first years of the twenty-first century saw the emergence of a new generation of young
writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, Karen Russell, Nathan Englander, Kevin Brockmeier, Jacob
Appel, George Saunders and Dan Chaon. Blogs and e-zines joined traditional paper-based
literary journals in showcasing the work of emerging authors.

[edit] See also

 Literary journal
 Tale
 Sketch story
 Essay
 Novella
 Novelette
 Flash fiction (also called microfiction)
 Drabble
 Vignette
 Irish short story

[edit] References & Further Reading

 Gelfant, Blanche and Graver, Lawrence, (eds.), The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-
Century American Short Story, Columbia University Press (2000)
 Hart, James (ed.) Oxford Companion to American Literature, Oxford University Press.
 Magill, Frank, (ed.) Short Story Writers. Salem Press, Pasadena, California (1997).
 Watson, Noelle (ed.) Reference Guide to Short Fiction. St. James Press, Detroit (1994).

[edit] Notes
1. ^ Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Awards FAQ. (Accessed 11/12/09)
2. ^ Deirdre Fulton (2008-06-11). "Who reads short shorts?". theponeix.com.
http://thephoenix.com/Portland/Arts/63088-Who-reads-short-shorts/. Retrieved 2009-06-
15.

[edit] External links

Wikisource has several original texts related to: Short stories

 The Writing of the Short Story by Lewis Worthington Smith

 American Short Story Chronology
 Short stories at the Open Directory Project

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