Contemporary short stories I-III. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The short story in America, one frequently hears, has come of age. Surely the patronizing figure is an inadvertent slander, gloomily suggestive as it is of a phase in the life span, indicating as it does a triumphant survival over childhood diseases and adolescent perplexities, an arrival at a state of legal, mental, and biological responsibility. Being of age, the short story should, one supposes, settle down, mature. But maturity, a state somewhere between coming of age and dying, is often characterized by an aversion to experiment; and dying is invariably characterized by an inability to experiment. Yet experiment, it scarcely need be said, has been the life blood of the short story. No one felicitates the novel on having reached adulthood, although critics do sometimes querulously wonder toward what its development tends; and it would be well that the short story not be rushed into ossification by premature congratulation. It is enough, more accurate of the present and more hopeful of the future, to say that the short story, rejuvenated in America in the nineteenth century, continues vital, proliferous, and changing in the twentieth. The technical developments have been many. The narrator as presider and commentator, explaining as he goes along and steering the reader to the correct reactions, has, if not vanished, at any rate stepped aside. So doing, he has made short-story reading a more demanding and therefore a more stimulating experience. Employing more economical, less cumbersome narrative techniques, operating far more than his predecessors from within his characters' consciousness, he takes an organic view of all the materials of his story. According to this view, the end effect of the story is all. The author no longer, as Irving so habitually did, intrudes his vii