A friend of mine recently asked me how to read a short story. She asked me through text (SMS) message, and I had to think on my feet and give her a quick answer. Being in SMS, my response was short but I think it captured the gist of what one has to have in mind when reading a short story. This article will be the longer version of my reply. I will be talking about the realistic story, but you may apply it to the postmodern short story (e.g., the fantastic) if you want.
INTUITIVE TO ANALYTICAL
Like writing a short story, there is no single way, and no hard and fast rules of reading it. As a general guideline, however, one should read a story in two stages: the Intuitive and the Analytical. This is another way of saying that we use first our right brain followed by the left. By and large, this is the sequence, although these two stages are not mutually exclusive, and some elements of the second stage may take place while one is in the Intuitive stage. But as a rule of thumb, one should take in a story intuitively first, and then be analytical later.
INTUITIVE
To get the most out of reading a story, one has, like appreciating a movie, or any other work of art for that matter, enjoy the experience first. I speak of enjoyment in the sense of letting the story do its work, of letting it move you, letting the characters move you, letting their problems and how they deal with them touch you. Identify with the characters if need be, but the most important thing of all is to be open. At this stage let the story connect with you at the emotional level.
At this stage too, learn to appreciate the silences, the pauses between characters. There is so much truth in the silences between characters as there is in any confrontational dialogue. One should be sensitive to what's happening beneath the surface, the emotional undercurrent, or subtext, if you will.
I also mentioned that one has to be open. Being open, means being open not only to the story, but to the mystery itself. Now, I know that this is very abstract and very epistemological, but I guess what I am simply trying to say is this: Does the story strike at the core of what it means to be human, of what it means to live on this planet? Being open to the mystery also means to be receptive to the truth of what life is all about. Which leads us to a very important aspect of the short story.
When I say truth, I don't mean the "truth in a nutshell" as conveyed by the mainstream Hollywood movie. I mean the truth in all its contradictions -- how we try our best to straighten our lives, but things don't always turn out like we expect it. Or how we try to plan them, but we don't always end up with the expected results. How life cannot be encapsuled in such pithy statements and clichés as "Life is what we make it," or even "That's life." for more often than not, it's "That's life?" with emphasis on the question mark.
I know I will have to hit the philosophy books and write my own to fully explain this seeking for truth in this story, but I guess the most important thing to remember in dealing and mining the truth in the short story is to take in each of the characters' truths. And how does one know if a story has it? Simple. You say to yourself: Yes, that's what's life is, not the canned truth from Hollywood. That's how I make love, that is how to raise a child, that is how to have a death in the family -- expected and unexpected -- that is what I would do if I were in that character's situation, or that's I wouldn't do, but since that character is the way he is, that's what he did. In other words, the enjoyment that I mentioned earlier comes from that recognition, the recognition that the writer has captured what it means to be human.
Now we go to the second phase of how to read a short story. For students who are about to write a paper or critique, this may come in handy.
ANALYTICAL
After you've thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading the story, it's now time for the next phase and we try to analyze what happened to us, or how and why the story affected us the way it had. This is perhaps the time to re-read the story or to go over certain passages that moved us, and we try to pin down why they moved us the way they did.
First, it is important to bear in mind that the usual realistic story, like any written work of art, has a beginning, middle, and end, although these components may assume forms we are not used to. And just like reading a short story, they are not mutually exclusive or set in sequential time.
The beginning is where we encounter the character in the beginning of a crisis. However, I must qualify this, for more often than not, the character is already in crisis. Here we find out what his problem is. We also find out his present relations with other characters in the story, and their roles in the greater scheme of things. How are they contributing to the character's problems?
The middle is where the character tries to sort out his or her problem(s). In most realistic stories, this is not very straightforward, and you don't get signposts for this. All we have are what's happening to the character. We aren't told that the character is trying to solve a problem. This is so, because half or most of the time, the character doesn't even know that he has a problem. Or to put in another way, he is not aware that he has a problem, because he is not aware that he is a character. (In the last statement, we have somewhat crossed over into the realm of postmodern fiction, but that's for another article.)
The ending of the story usually occurs when the character of the story has changed. In a realistic story this is usually where the epiphany occurs. Epiphany, which is derived from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning "to show," and as a religious term refers to God revealing himself, was first used by the writer James Joyce in the literary context when he first used it in his autobiographical work, Stephen Hero, which he later revised into the novel, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Here is the exact quote. "By an epiphany he [Stephen Daedalus] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
If we try to digest all of these information, and try to simplify it -- although emotionally, it can never be really simple -- epiphany then is the moment when a particular truth is revealed to the character. The classic example, of course, is the ending of a James Joyce story, "Araby." If you haven't read it, go ahead and look for it in Joyce's brilliant short story collection Dubliners. In fact, Dubliners is a great collection to read if you want to master the "art of the epiphany." It is important to note that the epiphany may be as obvious (obvious in the sense that the character is realizing something) in "Araby," or may be totally left unsaid, as in a Raymond Carver story. Read the latter's "Why Don't You Dance?" in his short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, for an example. In his interviews, Carver would always mention his literary idol Anton Chekhov, who preferred the unresolved story. For the two men, just to ask the question is enough. Which is just another way of saying that in the short story, we are presented with what life is all about.
CONCLUSION
And so we have come full circle, from the complexities and mysteries of life to epiphany, back to life, itself. We have travelled such a circuitous route, because, basically, like any other work of art, the short story is about truth, about the truth of us being human, about our continuous discovery that there are layers and layers of truth about life. We read, and write the short story, because it reminds us of the gift, bittersweet as it may be, of our existence.
