Short stories evolved from oral tradition, parables, mythologies and fairy tales often embellishing some moral truth besides the obvious attempt to entertain. Focused on few characters with minimal distractions, usually simple plots, settings and time lines, these brief tales climax quickly, satisfying some readers’ impatience to get to the point, the finish line, the satisfactory ah-ha, got it, punch lines. Novels get there eventually but their long drawn out meanderings appeal to a slower mind and a more leisurely time, distracting us when we are laid up, on vacation, snow days, unemployed or retired.
Short stories encourage us to race. They wet our appetite for more of that author’s art. Short stories are like going to an upscale restaurant where presentation and balance of flavours are the appeal, the appetite still strong after the check arrives. A novel is a cheap smorgasbord enticing you to stay long after your fill, the mind on automatic pilot no longer aware of ambiance, fragrance or what else to anticipate. The mind no longer has to work, only to be pointed in a direction and let gravity take the reins. Short stories, like appetizers tease the taste buds. Novels are calorie laden, weighing us down, cocooning us against the harsh realities of our own boring lives. Short stories wake us up to the dilemma and stimulate the reader to think about its truth and practicality.
Both Carver’s Cathedral and Chekhov’s Lady with Lapdog explore the unhappy, unfulfilling realm of being in superficial primary relationships. The protagonists are barely aware of their alienation until they actually connect with another human and the bittersweet awareness awakens profound feelings they had not even considered in their ordinary cynical lives. These people are starving and not cognisant until they connect to another’s suffering, another’s awareness of loss before they can acknowledge their own. This connection feeds the senses and the readers’ mouths water as we see human tragedy and aloneness as the central motif in so many movies, books, and songs. The bigger tragedy is Mansfield’s The Fly, in which her boss character never connects with anyone not even the poor fly burdened and drowned by ink. Her story leaves a bad taste, mankind is condemned to anguish with no hope for redemption. Selfish and conceited to carry on in the thoughtless callous patterns we each assume.
All three stories leave us wanting more. Curiosity of what happens next is superseded by the reality we suspect, of more pain and suffering. These people struggle to connect to their own situation and maybe some limited solutions, as they grow, mature emotionally, empathizing, feeling and exploring or not. Self-reflection is not for everyone and short story readers must be satisfied with what the author choses to present and how he plates the morsels, which spices to enhance flavour and to titillate our appetites for more.
Thurber’s The Secret life of Walter Mitty is so fast paced, it is intoxicating. Mitty’s inner splendour had me drooling. Why can’t I experience such pleasurable escapism without the crutches of TV, MP3s, books and the like. Mitty takes his wife’s henpecking like a man, tunes her out and becomes the hero of his own movie. Thurber shows us in an impossible situation we still have free choice and effectively illustrates this in a few pages. The novel would be escapism itself, bloated and crawling to the finish line as more and more of his dysfunctional relationship weighs us down.
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