Dr. Karen Palmer

Short fiction, also known as short stories, is a work of short, narrative prose that is usually centered around one single event. It is limited in scope and has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Although a short story has much in common with a novel, it is written with much greater precision.

In this chapter, you will learn how to write an analysis of a short story using a literary lens. The first step in your journey is to choose a short story from the Short Fiction Anthology.

How to Read and Analyze Short Fiction

It is impossible to be a good writer without being a good reader first. Writers read for various reasons, for guidance and inspiration, to understand something about life, or just for enjoyment. Perhaps the key to ‘reading as a writer’ – in other words, reading with a writerly eye – is being able to understand a text as its smaller parts while still appreciating it as a whole.

Reading the work of a variety of different authors is invaluable for expanding your awareness of what a text can be and do. Reading provides not only inspiration and useful examples of methods, subjects, and styles, but also a context within which to develop your own voice and individuality as a writer. The more you learn about how texts operate, the better equipped you’ll be as a writer.

Reading as a writer, also known as ‘critical reading’ or ‘close reading,’ involves analyzing how a piece works and how an author achieves particular effects. When reading a short story, readers should consider how the writer uses elements like point of view, tone, and structure to generate tension, portray a theme, or create a compelling ending.

Think about why the author made certain choices in their piece, and what the outcomes of those choices are. Remember: texts are not simply given. They are the result of countless decisions on the writer’s part. Some of them might be instinctual and might not seem like conscious decision-making to the writer, but a great deal of them will also be the result of painstaking deliberation. We might not be able to know an author’s personal intention, but we can analyze what effect their choices have on us.

Tips for Reading

1. As in poetry, read the short story for enjoyment first. Make sure you understand what is happening in the story.  If you have questions about the basic story line, you can read the story again, find a YouTube video of someone reading the story out loud, watch a movie of the story, or use an online source like SparkNotes or Wikipedia to give you a summary and basic background about the story. Note: Though these resources can’t be used to support any academic writing, they can help you deepen your understanding of the story and get you moving in the write direction. 
2. Next, read the story with a pen in hand, annotating as you read. Underline passages you find important and take notes in the margins. Circle words you don’t know and look up definitions. In this step, you are trying to uncover more meaning. Note: If you don’t have a printed copy of this text, you can copy and paste the story into a Word document and print it out. 
3. Finally, think about the theme of the story. What lesson does the main character learn? What can we learn about life from reading the story? Note: As in reading poetry, your unique experiences will color the way you understand the story, but the argument you make should be grounded in the text.

After reading a work carefully, annotating it, and reacting to it, the next step is to determine how it fits into your perspective on the world. Forming your own conclusions about a literary work, or a topic of any kind, is the first step to shaping an argument and, ultimately, making a case for your perspective through a persuasive essay.

Basics of Short Fiction

Starting with your own personal response to a story can help you remember to enjoy the story and to ensure that you understand it. However, if you only write about your personal reaction to a story, there won’t be much to support your argument except your word alone. Thus, you will need to use some facts from the text to support your argument. Rather than trying to evaluate every nuance of a text all at once, you should start with the basics: character and plot. From there, you can examine the theme of the work and then move on to the finer points such as the writing itself. For instance, when determining how you want to analyze a piece of literature, you might want to ask yourself the following series of questions.

Before you dive straight into your analysis of symbolism, diction, imagery, or any other rhetorical device, you need to have a grasp of the basic elements of what you’re reading. When we read critically or analytically, we might disregard character, plot, setting, and theme as surface elements of a text. Aside from noting what they are and how they drive a story, we sometimes don’t pay much attention to these elements. However, characters and their interactions can reveal a great deal about human nature. Plot can act as a stand-in for real-world events just as setting can represent our world or an allegorical one. Theme is the heart of literature, exploring everything from love and war to childhood and aging.

Characterization:

The way an author creates a character is called characterization. Characterization includes the physical traits of characters, their personalities, and the way they speak. Authors might make judgments, either explicit (stated plainly) or implicit (allowing the reader to judge), about the characters in a story.

The characters are the people in a story. The narrator is the voice telling the story, but the narrator may or may not be a character in the story. The protagonist is the central character. The antagonist is the force or character that opposes the main character. Characters might be static (remain the same) or dynamic (change through the course of the story).

In addition to the protagonist and antagonist, most stories have secondary or minor characters. These are the other characters in the story. They sometimes support the protagonist or antagonist in their struggles, and they sometimes never come into contact with the main characters. Authors use minor characters for a variety of reasons. For instance, they can illustrate a different side of the main conflict, or they can highlight the traits of the main characters.

One important type of minor character is called a foil. This character emphasizes the traits of a main character (usually the protagonist) through contrast. Thus, a foil will often be the polar opposite of the main character in the story. Sometimes, the foil can take the form of a sidekick or friend. Other times, he or she might be someone who contends against the protagonist. For example, an author might use a decisive and determined foil to draw attention to a protagonist’s lack of resolve and motivation.

Finally, any character in a story can be an archetype. We can define archetype as an original model for a type of character, but that doesn’t fully explain the term. One way to think of an archetype is to think of how a bronze statue is made. First, the sculptor creates his design out of wax or clay. Next, he creates a fireproof mold around the original. After the mold is done, the sculptor can make as many of the same sculpture as he pleases. The original model is the equivalent to the archetype.

Some popular archetypes are the trickster figure, such as Coyote in Native American myth or Brer Rabbit in African American folklore, and the femme fatale, like Pandora in Greek myth. Keep in mind that archetype simply means original pattern and does not always apply to characters. It can come in the form of an object, a narrative, etc. For instance, the apple in the Garden of Eden provides the object-based forbidden fruit archetype, and Odysseus’s voyage gives us the narrative-based journey home archetype.

Here’s a video on Archetype and Characterization from Shmoop:

Plot & Structure

In essence, the plot is the action of the story. Most short fiction follows the traditional pattern of Greek drama, with an introduction, rising action involving a conflict, the climax in which a crisis occurs (the turning point), and a resolution (how the conflict is resolved).

Here are some questions to consider about plot:

• What is the most important event?
• How is the plot structured? Is it linear, chronological or does it move around?
• Is the plot believable?

Here’s another great video from Shmoop describing plot: Power in Literature, Short Stories Part 4: Plot

The structure is the design or form of the story. The structure can provide clues to character and action and can mirror the author’s intentions. Look for repeated elements in action, gestures, dialogue, description, and shifts.

Here’s one way to look at this: Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Setting

If a story has characters and a plot, these elements must exist within some context. The frame of reference in which the story occurs is known as setting. The most basic definition of setting is the location and time frame in which the story takes place.

Setting doesn’t have to just include the physical elements of time and place. Setting can also refer to a story’s societal context. This could include both the context of the story itself and the context of the author who is writing the story.

There are two questions to consider when dealing with this kind of setting: “What is the cultural and social setting of the story?” and “What was the author’s cultural and social setting when the story was written?” The first question will help you analyze why characters make certain choices and act in certain ways. The second question will allow you to analyze why the author chose to have the characters act in this way.

Setting is created with elements such as geography, weather, time of day, social conditions, etc. Think about what role setting plays in the story. Is it an important part of the plot or theme? Or is it just a backdrop against which the action takes place?

Here’s a video from Shmoop on Setting: Power in Literature, Short Stories Part 2: Setting

Theme

One thing you should remember about theme is that it must be expressed in a complete sentence. For instance, “discrimination” is not a theme; however, “genetic modification in humans is dangerous because it can result in discrimination” is a complete theme.

It’s important to note that a story can have more than one theme, and there is no one right or wrong theme, though there are often themes that are more popular. Sometimes those themes connect or conflict; sometimes they are used to bring a reader’s attention to multiple topics; and sometimes multiple themes result from stories about the complexity of life.

So how do we find theme in a work? One way is to examine motifs, or recurring elements in a story. If something appears a number of times within a story, it is likely significant. A motif can be a statement, a place, an object, or even a sound. Motifs often lead us to discern a theme by drawing attention to it through repetition. In addition, motifs are often symbolic. They can represent any number of things, from a character’s childhood to the loss of a loved one. By examining what a motif symbolizes, you can extrapolate a story’s possible themes.

For instance, a story might use a park to represent a character’s childhood. If the author makes constant references to the park, but we later see it replaced by a housing complex, we might draw conclusions about what the story is saying about childhood and the transition to adulthood.

Though theme is similar to message or argument, it is not necessarily an assertion like the other two terms are. In connecting to a work’s meaning, a theme can refer to key topics of a work. Thus, while we might say “Ode on a Grecian Urn” argues that the state of desire should be appreciated beyond the moment of satisfaction, we might state that the themes of the poem are becoming versus being, the role of timeless art in a time-dependent world, and the relationship between beauty and truth.

This video focuses on theme from a film perspective, but it is an interesting discussion that is also applicable to the short story. Seeing the connection between film and story can often help to clarify ideas, just as seeing connections between music and poetry can help us to better understand poems. How To Find A Theme

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Attributions:

• Content created by Dr. Karen Palmer. Licensed under CC BY NC SA.
• Introduction adapted from “About Critical Reading” from OpenLearn and licensed under CC BY NC SA.
• Content adapted from Writing About Literature: The Basics and licensed CC BY NC.