Short Story Writers :: Writers Literature Fusco Essays

Short Story WritersAnd and then I woke up.Thus goes the kind of trick ending that every premier year writing student is told to avoid, a mark of cheap theatrics and poor craftsmanship.Historically, this kind of ending is often associated with Guy de Maupassant, the prolific French author of the 19th century, or his twentieth century American heir apparent, O. atomic number 1 (William S. Porter).In this well researched and at moments insightful book, Richard Fusco argues that Maupassants bad rap as premier(prenominal) and foremost the inventor and disseminator of the trick ending is undeserved.What Fusco feels Maupassant does deserve is acquaintance as perhaps the single most important influence on American short story writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Henry James, and of course O. Henry.However, even as Fuscos readings of these writers are praiseworthy in their thoroughness (with the exception of his treatment of O. Hen ry), his overall argument seems finally also dependent on an understanding of trick ending which does not slang necessary distinctions, and is therefore superficial enough to accommodate nearly both writer one cares to name. Not that Fusco doesnt differentiate between types of trick endings.In fact, he develops his own seven categories of stories--from the simplest (linear) to most complex (sinusoidal)--based on their varying emplacement and number of stripping points for the reader.The first two chapters, where Fusco limits himself to a thorough and provoke analysis of narrative structure in Maupassant, are the best of the book.However, in shifting his terms from trick endings to discovery points, Fusco deprives his argument of its specificity and thus its power. To reference book one example Fusco argues that Maupassant and Bierce were similar in that they favored fictive structures that depended on last-second, ironic reversals in the readers perception.He then uses this t heorized similarity to compare Maupassants much-anthologized The Necklace to the that of Bierces equally popular Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.In analyzing these (and separate) stories by the two writers, Fusco uses Poes mavin of effect as a synonym for discovery point (which is in itself too reductionist a reading of what Poe meant).However, unity of effect for Maupassant in The Necklace is utterly dependent on discipline untouchable to the reader, i.e., that the necklace is paste, and thus the readers discovery depends entirely on an absence, a trick of concealment, as in a bad murder mystery.In Owl Creek, on the other hand, one need only read closely in the region where Peyton first falls from the bridge (and, in reality, dies) to obtain all the information necessary to correctly interpret the rest of the story as an hallucination.