Essays on Short Story

Everyone has dreams and desires, but sometimes these can make it hard to think of someone besides one’s self. In the story “Raymond’s Run,” Squeaky is a determined and confident girl who is in the process of refining her value and personality. At the beginning...

Writing in Italy during the 14th century, Boccaccio is caught in the historical dichotomy between the blind adherence to the Church that permeated the Middle Ages and the emerging Humanism that characterized the Renaissance. It is clear that Boccaccio chooses to look forward, as he...

Written as an allegory for slavery and the way it affects the people who employ it, Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” questions just how much of an impact living in a society has on one’s willingness to act in ways...

James Joyce wrote two versions of his short story “The Sisters,” the first one under the pen name of Stephen Daedalus. Both versions tell the story of a boy and a priest, Father Flynn. The latter dies, and the people around him react to the...

When she pushed the big gates open, the touch of the iron bars were as cold as ice. She could feel the bumpiness of the old cobbled path beneath her, they were smooth unlike the crunching of the odd dead leaf that she stepped on....

The faint sound of people talking, to the calmness and ghostly silence, was suddenly disrupted by a thundering sound. Out of nowhere a bullet soared in front of me, I crashed into shelves of cans causing chaos all throughout the grocery store. People were running...

Dorothy M. Johnson’s short story “A Man Called Horse” transgresses some of the conventions of the classical Western genre. In this sense, Johnson’s text can be read as a “revisionist Western”, in so far as Johnson does not merely adhere to the dominant norms and...

Introduction Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval masterpiece “The Decameron” is a collection of stories, chronicled over ten days, which highlights the best and worst of human nature. Boccaccio’s tales deal with themes such as adultery, love, premarital sex, devotion, trickery, and manipulation, among others. Yet this work...

The Other Woman, by Virgilio Samonte, is a short story that set out a fray-like relationship between spouse and mistresses. The Other Woman is written in narrative form, where the author used excessive aesthetic words to define the situations, emotions, and the settings effectively, which...

Raymond Carver’s short story, A Small Good Thing, and Ray Lawrence’s film, Jindabyne, miscellaneously explore the idea that individuals can experience isolation. Carver delineates a tale about two parents struggling with their son’s brain injury after a hit and run accident and the incessant phone...

The characters whom inhabit Joyce’s world in “Dubliners,” often have, as Harvard Literature Professor Fischer stated in lecture, a “limited way” of thinking about and understanding themselves and the world around them. Such “determinism,” however, operates not on a broad cultural scale, but works in...

“Good night,” the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly, you do not want music. Nor...

Guns, Germs, and Steel sets out to tell the history for the last 13,000 years. It also aims to explain why some societies were much more successful than others. Some of this success can be given to population growth, immunity to germs, and animal domestication....

‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…’ Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of considering the mundane in literature....

William Dean Howells’ short story “Editha,” published in 1905, revolves around ideals about war and the romanticized vision of it. Through each character, Howells presents a contrasting view of war. Editha, and her view of God-intended glorious war, is able to push her fiancé George...

In this amazing short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, by Ursula Le Guin. It is all about a society, that has a perfect image of itself and its people. However, there is a dark and twisted secret, a child that sacrifices its...

“The necklace”, is a short story by Guy De Maupassant, it revolves around a young woman who had these desires to have things she couldn’t afford. Mathilide the protagonist in this story, was invited to a ball, but she did not have enough money to...

I really did not know what to write about, but I was reminded this morning as I stopped to fuel the car up, of one of my most embarrassing moments since I moved back “home”. It was an early morning and I was off to...

Of all of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, one stands out as a clear example of character growth through emotional maturity and connection with another human being. “Sophistication” tells that story, one of the simultaneous climax of two peoples’ youth, and their epiphanic transition into...