Essay About Short Stories

Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves The short story as a literary form has the power to convey ideas as complex and nuanced as longer-form fiction. As King (2007) notes, short stories often struggle to find an audience, despite being on the surface easier to digest. Their length makes them perfect for brief reading, but the audience seems constantly dwindling. Yet the short story medium has precisely the power to articulate everyday issues in meaningful ways, something seen in Karen Russell's St.

Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, for example. Minus (2009), in reviewing an anthology of short stories, supports King's idea that there are still some excellent short story writers in America, if they are a dying breed. Short stories should have a fairly high energy level, moving quickly through their narrative, as compact as it is, in order to convey ideas. This should be a pinnacle of writing, then, because it demands the author to be efficient, and to write every sentence with particular punch.

When a story is creative and powerful, it becomes a great short story. Russell's story echoes the conflict experienced in bi-cultural immigrant children. The girls leave their homes of early childhood, which are closer to their birth culture, but in school they become enculturated with their new land. They progress through different stages of growth to the point where they theoretically become bicultural.

Yet, the bicultural nature is illusory in Russell's work, as the children have lost much of their older culture -- the process of assimilation can take only one generation, or at best two. There are also colonial echoes here in this story. In particular the imagery of the religious school used for enculturation can be found in Jesuit schools around the world, and was even used in North America well into the 20th century to transform people from their former culture to the modern one.

The story has power precisely because it is open to multiple interpretations. King praises this work, rightly, because it has energy, context, and can be quite thought-provoking in seeking to determine its precise meaning. The immigrant theme is common in literature today -- immigrant stories inherently have this internal, cultural identity conflict, and are therefore not only powerful but common in immigrant cultures (Wagner, 2010).

People come to new countries, but if they arrive as adults they often have a strong sense of identity, and never really progress through the different stages described in the story. Their children, however, do, because they are more malleable. It can be a difficult transition, and like the narrator many people find it easier to choose one culture or another, rather than truly becoming bicultural as the Jesuits in the story suggest.

The nature of biculturalism thus becomes an important idea here -- the people doing the enculturation on behalf of the dominant culture might argue that somebody is bicultural, but internally the suggestion is that this might not be the case for some people. The metaphor that Russell uses presents specific overtones, in particular that the immigrants are barbarians (Russell's word) until they have embraced their new culture. This notion aligns with the melting pot narrative of America, which itself carries with it this same overtones of superiority.

The narrator loses her original culture for the most part, and struggles to relate to those who have been culturally left behind. This conclusion highlights the nature of the conflict, in how cultural change can separate a people from their past. The Jesuit lessons that believe that this stage is superior to other stages where people still value their original culture highlights that forced enculturation in particular carries with it the overtones of cultural superiority.

The lupine metaphor, of course, serves to portray universality of the experience -- nothing is specific to any known national culture. Instead, the wild culture is universal, generic, in a way that broadens the understanding of the message; nobody can say "it's not like that in my culture." This rich use of metaphor, especially the animal one, echoes other works of literature such as Animal Farm or Watership Down that seek to convey messages about human nature in a neutral manner.

The short story medium, as King argues, has the ability to do this, in an accessible way, and this is why he expresses sadness that the medium is struggling to find its audience. The depth of emotional and complexity of subject matter on display are vital. Minus' critiques of the anthologies, do little credit to the authors or the short story as a medium, on the other end.

While King argues that short stories can be powerful and advocates for more attention paid to the medium, Minus all but dismisses it. It was better before, he suggests, and you can almost hear the old man in him, railing on about walking uphill both ways to school in the snow. So what if it was better before? Is that a reason to dismiss the writers.