Short Fiction and Plot

After being asked to read around twenty pages of a textbook that I had never laid eyes on before and promised itself to be boring and stale, I found myself dreading the reading experience. However, upon actually getting into the physicality of the reading, the textbook was not as dull as I expected. I wanted to read more, unlike the usual where I would get tired of it halfway through a paragraph. The reason, I realized, was because it was actually engaging and even comical at times instead of dry and tedious prose that the writer expects the reader to fall asleep to. I wanted to comment on that immediately because it feels like something that should be noted in a course where we explicitly talk about good and bad styles of writing. 

Upon reading more into the textbook, I did agree with the point that although tales and fables had little decoration, they were still "good reads." This sets forth the idea that even if you only have the bare bones of a story, you still have a story--possibly a good one. When reading short fiction, you must look past the non-decoration and see that it doesn't help the story, but merely distracts the reader. If a shop boy is not described to his full extent and is left instead a "stick figure" of a character, we can look past it to instead see the message of the piece. 

I also learned that the word "tale" is used to tell short stories in bare detail, and that this was because most story tellers told their stories and couldn't elaborate fully on every detail in them. This was particularly interesting to me because I find the tradition of oral history really captivating. It's so enthralling that for years and years we didn't write down stories but merely told them. I wonder how this has influenced story telling and writing in the future? Were stories originally very descriptive but then passed down so many times that they reached their bones before finally being written? Are we basing entire histories off of pieces of work that may or may not be the bones of a once meaty story? These questions are really intriguing to me and I wonder what their answers would be. 

---

I reached "Godfather Death" and "A&P" with some trepidation, but mostly it was excitement because all of the previous stories were really interesting. I was also able to compare them to a television show I watch obsessively and I thought that made the whole thing all the more engaging. 

In "A&P," I thought that the protagonist was Sammy because he seemed to be who was telling the story and his emotions were focused on rather than anyone else's. The antagonist would be Sammy's boss, Lengel, who told the girls to leave the grocery store. I picked Lengel because he forced Sammy to make a choice about whether or not he was going to stay and also made the girls promise not to dress that way again.  

The external conflict presented was Lengel forcing the girls to not come back to the store unless they were dressed decently. This is the external conflict because it is physically happening and is some outside force against the characters. The internal conflict was when Sammy had to choose whether or not to quit. This is because it happened inside of our protagonist and caused a conflict. This conflict was preceded by the story's climax: Lengel coming out of his office and questioning the girls, making Sammy think about what he had to do himself. The elements that foreshadowed this event were when the sentence, "Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family thinks it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself," came up. This said that something bad was going to happen but we weren't exactly sure what.

I don't believe Sammy to be any less of a hero for wanting the girls to notice him. If there were no girls in the first place, Sammy probably wouldn't have quit. The girls were a necessary part of the equation (kind of like a constant) and if Sammy needed them to notice him (an extra that we can place off to the side) to carry on with his quitting (the dependent variable), then so be it. 

The character Sammy is portrayed more fully through the use of comedy and real-life thoughts and dialogue. Through this we see some of his emotions and thoughts. With the doctor in "Godfather Death," we only saw the bare surface of a man. However, for that story, this was completely okay. It didn't detract from the overall message at all. With "A&P," if we'd known none of the thoughts or emotions of the character it would have seemed dull and without a message. This displays that different types of short stories must have different approaches taken to get across the right message. 

I don't think that supermarket setting of the story is entirely vital. This story could be in a lot of different places and still have the same effect. The only thing that would possibly have to be adjusted with a change of setting would be Lengel's reason for making the girls leave, and in turn, why Sammy would quit or, in a change of setting, do some other similar thing. Whether or not it is in a supermarket, you'll still get the moral/message. 

The differences in story-telling from the older fiction to "A&P" were very small. The moral/message was in each, but it was harder to find in the newer works. In the older fiction, the story was bare and decoration-less with stick figure characters who only served the purpose of pawn. While in the newer fiction, characters were better described but only because it helped the story move forward. As previously stated, if in "A&P" Sammy had been a stick figure character, the message/moral would not have come across clearly. 

In modern literature, we have writers who carry on the tradition of bare bones writing (Ernest Hemingway) and we have writers who begin anew with complexly described characters and many adjectives (Jane Austen). However, most literature nowadays is more "A&P" style and not just a skimpy story with a simple message. We now have convoluted story lines and messages that are caught up in different messages. While this may seem confusing, I think it just shows how far we as writers have evolved from our original "tales" and stick figure characters used as pawns in our lengthy game of chess.