The short story is a protean form. It may be
very short indeed, or it may stretch until it approaches the short novel in
length. It may be told in numerous ways, through various points of view; and it
may be unfold chronologically or jump blithely from present to past and back
again. Considering all of this, it may be futile to
try to define the form precisely, and yet there is much that a short story
always is regardless of variations. It is always about something: usually about
people or objects (which ultimately say something about people); it always
entails conflicts of one sort or another (and some of the greatest conflicts or
decided by mute artillery within the skull, and not with guns and knives); and
it invariably says something about universal problems as well as about its
characters. In other words, if two men are in conflict and one man wins and the
other loses, the author, in explaining and showing why or how the loser lost
and the winner won, is also saying something about cause and effect relationship;
and about the values and mores of the actual world - at least as he believes
them to exist.
A good short story is more than a look into the world that an author sees. It is product of craft and intelligence. Its
shortness makes it hard because it must make its point with few words. Because
of this limitation, most short stories confine themselves to one, two or three
characters and to one significant event or climactic segment in the lives of
its characters. In one sense, though, a good story is much “longer” than its
wordage. After the reader has read such a story, he feels that he knows much
more about the characters and the situation of the stories than the author has
told him. A short story is somewhat like an iceberg: the mass of ice seen above
the water is much smaller than that which is submerged and which supports it.
The author before and in the process of writing his story has ranged much
further across the lives of his characters than the story permits him to cover
explicitly. The finished story is supported by this unseen but massive
intellectual and emotional involvement on the part of the author. This is the
relationship that the reader feels when he reads a short story and senses that
he knows more about its people and their world than the author has told him
directly.
