How Fiction Works

A good way to begin discussing fiction might be to look at some. The following is more a sketch
than a fully developed short story, but it raises a number of important questions about how
fiction works.
PAULETTE CHILDRESS WHITE
Alice
Alice. Drunk Alice. Alice of the streets. Of the party. Of the house of dark places. From whom
without knowing I hid love all my life behind remembrances of her house where I went with
Momma in the daytime to borrow things, and we found her lounging in the front yard on a dirty
plastic lawn chair drinking warm beer from the can in a little brown bag where the flies buzzed in
and out of the always-open door of the house as we followed her into the cool, dim rank-
smelling rooms for what it was we’d come. And I fought frowns as my feet caught on the sticky
gray wooden floor but looked up to smile back at her smile as she gave the dollar or the sugar or
the coffee to Momma who never seemed to notice the floor or the smell or Alice.

Alice, tall like a man, with soft wooly hair spread out in tangles like a feathered hat and her face
oily and her legs ashy, whose beauty I never quite believed because she valued it so little but was
real. Real like wild flowers and uncut grass, real like the knotty sky-reach of a dead tree. Beauty of
warm brown eyes in a round dark face and of teeth somehow always white and clean and of lips
moist and open, out of which rolled the voice and the laughter, deep and breathless, rolling out
the strong and secret beauty of her soul.

Alice of the streets. Gentle walking on long legs. Close-kneed. Careful. Stopping sometimes at
our house on her way to unknown places and other people. She came wearing loose, flowered
dresses and she sat in our chairs rubbing the too-big knees that sometimes hurt, and we gathered,
Momma, my sisters and I, to hear the beautiful bad-woman talk and feel the rolling laughter,
always sure that she left more than she came for. I accepted the tender touch of her hands on my
hair or my face or my arms like favors I never returned. I clung to the sounds of her words and
the light of her smiles like stolen fruit.

Alice, mother in a house of dark places. Of boys who fought each other and ran cursing through
the wild back rooms where I did not go alone but sometimes with Alice when she caught them
up and knuckled their heads and made them cry or hugged them close to her saying funny things
to tease them into laughter. And of the oldest son, named for his father, who sat twisted into a
wheelchair by sunny windows in the front where she stayed with him for hours giving him her
love, filling him with her laughter and he sat there—his words strained, difficult but soft and
warm like the sun from the windows.

Alice of the party. When there was not one elsewhere she could make one of the evenings when
her husband was not storming the dim rooms in drunken fits or lying somewhere in darkness
filling the house with angry grunts and snores before the days he would go to work. He sat near
her drinking beer with what company was there—was always sure to come—greedy for Alice and
her husband, who leaned into and out of each other, talking hard and laughing loud and telling
lies and being real. And there were rare and wondrously wicked times when I was caught there
with Daddy who was one of the greedy ones and could not leave until the joy-shouting, table-
slapping arguments about God and Negroes, the jumping up and down, the bellowing “what
about the time” talks, the boasting and reeling of people drunk with beer and laughter and the
ache of each other was over and the last ones sat talking sad and low, sick with themselves and
too much beer. I watched Alice growing tired and ill and thought about the boys who had eaten
dinners of cake and soda pop from the corner store, and I struggled to despise her for it against
the memory of how, smiling they’d crept off to their rooms and slept in peace. And later at
home, I, too, slept strangely safe and happy, hugging the feel of that sweet fury in her house and
in Alice of the party.

Alice, who grew older as I grew up but stayed the same while I grew beyond her, away from her.
So far away that once, on a clear early morning in the spring, when I was eighteen and smart and
clean on my way to work downtown in the high-up office of my government job, with eyes that
would not see I cut off her smile and the sound of her voice calling my name. When she
surprised me on a clear spring morning, on her way somewhere or from somewhere in the streets
and I could not see her beauty, only the limp flowered dress and the tangled hair and the face
puffy from too much drinking and no sleep, I cut off her smile. I let my eyes slide away to say
without speaking that I had grown beyond her. Alice, who had no place to grow in but was deep
in the soil that fed me.
It was eight years before I saw Alice again and in those eight years Alice had buried her husband
and one of her boys and lost the oldest son to the county hospital where she traveled for miles to
take him the sun and her smiles. And she had become a grandmother and a member of the
church and cleaned out her house and closed the doors. And in those eight years I had married
and become the mother of sons and did not always keep my floors clean or my hair combed or
my legs oiled and I learned to like the taste of beer and how to talk bad-woman talk. In those
eight years life had led me to the secret laughter.

Alice, when I saw her again, was in black, after the funeral of my brother, sitting alone in an
upstairs bedroom of my mother’s house, her face dusted with brown powder and her gray-
streaked hair brushed back into a neat ball and her wrinkled hands rubbing the tight-stockinged,
tumor-filled knees and her eyes quiet and sober when she looked at me where I stood at the top
of the stairs. I had run upstairs to be away from the smell of food and the crowd of comforters
come to help bury our dead when I found Alice sitting alone in black and was afraid to smile
remembering how I’d cut off her smile when I thought I had grown beyond her and was afraid to
speak because there was too much I wanted to say.
Then Alice smiled her same smile and spoke my name in her same voice and rising slowly from
the tumored knees said, “Come on in and sit with me.” And for the very first time I did.

Let’s begin with a deceptively simple question: Who’s telling the story? Although Paulette
Childress White’s name appears above the title, we cannot easily know whether White is
recounting her own experiences or instead writing a fictional account of a fictional “I” who knew
a fictional “Alice.” Were the teller of the story (the “I”) an obvious lunatic, say, or a creature
from another galaxy, we might deduce that this “I” isn’t the author Paulette Childress White; but
since we cannot be certain, we can simply avoid the question by calling the voice telling the story
the narrator.

The choice of narrator is central in any piece of fiction. Had Alice herself narrated, for example,
we readers might have seen things quite differently—more emphasis, perhaps, on those painful
knees; physical description of the present narrator (let’s call her June) rather than of Alice; and,
most important, Alice’s thoughts rather than those of her young friend.

White also might have chosen to avoid an “I” or first-person narrator altogether, by telling the
story instead in a disembodied voice that described, perhaps dispassionately, what happened to
two individuals, Alice and June, each referred to in the third person, that is, as “she.” By
choosing the narrator she did, White has made the story at least as much about June as about
Alice. And if we look more carefully—at the sixth sentence in the story, for example, where we
find the phrase “without knowing”—we can be even more precise and say that the narrator is not
June as she was growing up, knowing Alice, but rather an older June remembering her changing
relationship to Alice. Thus, through her choice and construction of narrator, White has made this
a story about what a young woman growing up learned, though unaware of it at the time, from
her encounters with a woman named Alice.

Having understood the function of the particular narrator White has created, we can see more
clearly that this seemingly rambling sketch has a plot. Plot is not simply a sequence of events but
a web of relationships between those events. Central to most plots is conflict of some kind and
early on the story establishes a conflict between two different attitudes toward Alice, “Alice . . .
from whom without knowing I hid love all my life behind remembrances of her house.” The
narrator can still see the “dirty plastic lawn chair,” Alice drinking “warm beer from the can in a
little brown bag,” the flies buzzing, the “cool, dim rank-smelling rooms,” but also, “her smile.”
Drawn to Alice’s warmth, energy, and love, yet repelled by the sloppiness she cannot understand,
June has strongly conflicting feelings towards this “beautiful bad-woman.” As a child, June is at
once attracted and made nervous by Alice’s relaxed sensuality. She sees Alice’s lapses as mother
and homemaker not as evidence of the great burden her situation places on her, or as natural
consequences of her engaging spontaneity, but as a moral failing. She observes that Alice’s sons
eat dinners of “cake and soda pop from the corner store,” but also how happy they seem, and
has to “struggle to despise her.” At eighteen, dressed up and on the way to the government job
she is so proud of, June runs into a bedraggled Alice and snubs her, refuses to return her smile.
Eight years later, confident, settled, herself an overburdened mother, but also attuned now to
“the secret laughter,” she sees Alice again, and for the first time fully appreciates, understands,
and loves her. So while we have a character sketch of Alice, the plot centers around June.

“Alice” has a rather simple plot, but White makes the story rich with emotion through her use of
language, her style. The sixth sentence of the first paragraph, for example, through its length, its
rhythm, its easy flow, helps create a mood of dream-like remembering, as the adult narrator
gathers her past impressions of Alice. White also effectively uses many well-chosen details to
create a picture of Alice: her “too-big knees that sometimes hurt,” her “teeth somehow always
white and clean,” her “lips moist and open,” the warm beer she drank “from the can in a little
brown bag,” and later “her limp flowered dress” and “tangled hair.”

White also uses comparisons, or similes, to help us understand June’s feelings towards Alice. To
say that Alice’s beauty is “real like wild flowers and uncut grass, real like the knotty sky-reach of a
dead tree” is to communicate very concisely something rather complicated. When the narrator
says “I clung to the sounds of her words and the light of her smiles like stolen fruit,” we can
readily imagine her ambivalence. By the time we reach the end, when June was “afraid to speak
because there was too much I wanted to say,” White doesn’t have to tell us what June wanted to
say because she has already shown us—made us share those feelings.

Something else shown rather than told is the social dimension of “Alice,” the relationship of its
characters and their situations to their society and to such social categories as gender, race, and
class. That Paulette Childress White is a woman may be obvious; that she is black may be less
obvious; but consideration of both facts can help us see more in the story. Perhaps above all else,
“Alice” portrays a relationship between two women. For all her spirit and energy, Alice is worn
down by the responsibility of caring for a husband and sons, including one in a wheelchair,
responsibilities that fall on her because she is a woman in a society that assigns nurturing to
women. In rejecting Alice, June may be rejecting what she fears will be her own fate as a married
woman. The government job she holds so proudly (and it is on the way to this job that she so
cruelly snubs Alice) represents her hope that she might avoid that fate. Later, a mother
herself, experiencing many of the pressures of that role (her own floors are not always clean; now
she, too, relaxes with a beer sometimes), June has a fuller and more sympathetic understanding of
Alice, “who had no place to grow in,” and also a grateful understanding of how much the
example of Alice’s strength nurtured her as she was growing up. So the reconciliation at the end
is more than just a reconciliation between two people; it is a reconciliation between two women,
who have a special understanding because of the difficulties and, most important, the joys (that
“secret laughter”) that they share.

The ending of “Alice” represents a reconciliation also between two black people or, put another
way, between June and the black community towards which she felt so ambivalent while growing
up. This may be subtler than the feminism of the story, but there is enough evidence, especially
in the descriptions of Alice in the second paragraph, for us to infer that the characters are black,
even without knowing that the author is. Though White never spells this out, the poverty, and
the many losses Alice experiences—a son and husband dead, another son in the county
hospital—are surely related in some way to her status as an African American in a racist society.
And just as that government job represents June’s hope for escape from the suffering she sees in
her community (government jobs were among the few possible avenues out of poverty for
African Americans in recent decades), her reconciliation with Alice at the end represents a
reconciliation with her community, a fuller acceptance of her roots and of herself.

Now this might seem like “reading things into the story.” But we interpret whenever we read and
think about fiction. Other readings of “Alice” are of course possible; the point, if we want to
share our interpretations with others, is to offer evidence. Our interpretations will inevitably
depend not only on what the author has written but on who we are. A racist and sexist reader of
“Alice,” for example, might see it as a story about the eternal laziness of black women: Alice
drinks too much, neglects her children and her housekeeping responsibilities, creates her own
problems; June has a chance to better herself (the government gives her a job, after all) but
eventually becomes just like Alice. This, too, is a reading of the story, though a quite perverse
reading, one that seems to ignore a great deal of what White has written, perhaps most of all her
efforts to make Alice so sympathetic a character.

We can never say with any finality that one reading is the correct reading, but with an
understanding of the ways writers work to shape our responses, a community of readers, through
discussion, through argument, can begin to distinguish a careful and persuasive reading from one
that simply ignores what the author has written. The following more general discussion of how
fiction works is designed to help.*
POINT OF VIEW

A writer attempts to shape our responses to characters and events by telling a story from a
particular angle or perspective, much as a film maker through positioning of the camera shapes
our responses to a film. In fiction, as the discussion of “Alice” suggested, a writer’s construction
of a narrator—that is, the point of view—is central to our experience as readers.

Narrators are commonly categorized as either nonparticipant or participant narrators. A

nonparticipant narrator always speaks in the third person, referring to characters by name and
as “he” or “she,” never as “I.” This kind of narrative voice may develop a personality of its own
(humorous, sarcastic, solemn, and so on) but does not belong to any character in the fictional
world it creates. A nonparticipant narrator may comment on the action in the story but never
participates in it.

Nonparticipant narrators are usually labeled according to how much they know, how much they
tell us. An omniscient narrator knows not only what is happening everywhere but what
everyone is thinking. Such a narrator can provide us with broad overviews (“Smithville has been
for decades the dullest town in the state”), can describe events involving various characters
(“While Joe slept peacefully, his younger brother, across town, was buying a gun”), and can dip
into the minds of any number of characters to tell us their thoughts (“Carol wondered whether
her investigation of Joe’s murder would lead to a front page story”). An omniscient narrator is an
artifice—no individual could know so much—but an artifice that readers adapt to quickly and
that writers find an extremely flexible instrument for storytelling.

A limited omniscient narrator (or selective omniscient narrator) is also a third-person

narrator, a disembodied voice, but one that has access to the inner thoughts of only one character
and focuses on the experiences and perceptions of that single character, sometimes a character in
the thick of the story’s action, sometimes one on the periphery, more observer than actor. Since
in reality we have immediate access to the thoughts of only one person, ourself, the limited
omniscient point of view can often give us a strong sense of intimacy, an identification with the
character through whose consciousness events are filtered. If the narrative, or a section of it,
consists entirely of this character’s thoughts, as if spoken aloud to himself or herself, then we
have an interior monologue; and if these thoughts are presented not as a logical sequence of
statements but as a seeming jumble of thought fragments and sensory perceptions in an effort to
create a strong sense of the character’s inner reality, then we have stream of consciousness
writing. (Both the interior monologue and stream of consciousness writing, by the way, can also
be used with participant narrators.)

A third type of nonparticipant narrator is the objective narrator, a third-

person narrator that describes characters from the outside only, never revealing their thoughts.
Since readers want and need to know what characters are thinking, the burden on this kind of
“fly-on-the-wall” narrator, as it is often called, is to describe characters’ appearance, speech, and
actions in a way that enables us to infer their thoughts. An objective narrator is sometimes also
called a dramatic narrator, since dialogue—what characters say—often becomes, as in drama, the
key element in revealing their thoughts.

A participant narrator is a character in the story as well as the teller of the story. Such a narrator
describes a fictional world of which he or she is a part and therefore, like the narrator of “Alice,”
says “I.” This “I” may be central to the action, or a minor character, more witness than actor.
Like the limited omniscient narrator, the first-person participant narrator enters into the mind of
only one character, himself or herself. Use of a participant narrator can mean a loss of flexibility;
all that the writer can present directly to the reader are the words of a single character. But a
participant narrator can also create a certain intimacy and drama; as
we read we may feel as if a person (rather than a disembodied voice, as with a nonparticipant
narrator) is speaking directly to us.

When a writer reveals to us what a character is thinking, how a character sees the world, we
develop an attitude toward that character’s thinking. Depending on the writer’s language, the
nature and logic of that character’s views, their relation to events and other characters in the
story, we may identify with that character and find his or her views sensible, reasonable,
persuasive, or we may feel distant from that character and question those views. When we have a
participant narrator, often a child or other innocent, and we understand the implications of what
is happening better than that narrator does, we have a naive narrator. If the narrator comes to
conclusions we as readers know are wrong, we can speak of an unreliable narrator.

A writer can put distance between us and a participant narrator quite quickly. Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from Underground opens like this: “I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful
man. I am an unattractive man.” Then, a few paragraphs later, after describing his nasty, spiteful
behavior as a government official, the narrator tells us: “I was lying when I said just now that I
was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite.” Whether we decide this narrator is toying with us
or insane (or both), it doesn’t take much talk like this to alienate us from him. Though the entire
novel is narrated by this character, from his point of view, though we see only what he chooses
to show us and have access to no one’s thoughts but his, we scarcely identify with him. Instead
we watch him from an emotional distance, with morbid fascination.
A nonparticipant narrator can also distance us from the character whose thoughts are revealed.
“After the Party,” a short story by Tess Slesinger, begins like this:

Mrs Colborne had given three cocktail parties a week in honor of various celebrities, ever since
her nervous breakdown back in 1930. The doctor had told her then, when she was convalescing,
that she must get interested in something; he suggested dancing (she felt she was too old), social
work (but she shuddered, she had had dreadful experiences, really dreadful), writing a novel,
going round the world, being psychoanalyzed in Vienna, studying economics in London, taking a
course in sculpture, endowing a hospital, adopting a baby, breeding dogs, Christian Science (he
was very broad), collecting early clocks, marrying again (oh dear no, Mrs Colborne said, that was
as bad as social work), starting a publishing house, running an interior decorating shop, moving
to the country, or learning to hand-paint china.

The entire story is told from Mrs. Colborne’s point of view. Though we have ample access to her
thoughts, we don’t really share them. Slesinger has quickly and deftly led us to see Mrs. Colborne
in a way that she does not see herself, that is, to see her as foolish.

With participant and with limited omniscient, nonparticipant narrators, writers shape our attitude
towards events and characters not only by controlling distance between reader and character but
also by the choice of which character’s thoughts to reveal, and when. A story, say, of a domestic
dispute culminating in a woman leaving her husband would obviously look very different from
her point of view than from his; unless there were significant distancing we would tend to
sympathize with the character through whose eyes we saw events most often. A good way to
begin figuring out the significance of point of view in a work of fiction is to ask yourself the
following: What attitude is the writer trying to create towards the character whose thoughts are
revealed? And how would the story be different if narrated from a different point of view?

PLOT
A plot is a sequence of fictional events arranged in a meaningful pattern. A fictional plot is
usually based on or driven by conflict, that is, opposition or antagonism between two elements.
There may be conflict between two individuals, between two groups of people, between an
individual and society, even between two tendencies within an individual. Conflict in a work of
fiction is often complex and may consist of two or more constituent conflicts, whether
sequentially or simultaneously. In “Fire and Cloud,” a short story by Richard Wright, there is
conflict between the black and white communities in a small Southern town. At the same time,
there is conflict within the heart of black leader Reverend Taylor between his impulse to try to
help his people through compliance with the whites who rule the town and his growing
awareness that only militant action offers any real hope. The larger conflict is not resolved, but
the conflict within Taylor is, through his painful but also liberating decision to defy the white
leaders he’s feared and cowered before for so long.

We can often gain much insight into the meaning of a story by looking at the shape of its plot. A
happy ending, for example, can have very different implications than an unhappy ending. A
happy ending can tie everything together neatly, and help us forget whatever conflict set the plot
in motion; an unhappy ending can be messier, leaving conflicts unresolved, questions
unanswered, problems continuing. The social criticism of Alan Sillitoe’s story “The Loneliness of
the Long-distance Runner” (p. 1189), for example, would be seriously undermined if, at the end,
its troubled, angry, rebellious working-class hero were to get a good job, become a success, move
up the social ladder, and settle down as a happy, comfortable, well-fed family man. We needn’t go
so far as this hero does (he calls the few books he’s read “useless” because “all of them ended on
a winning post and didn’t teach me a thing”) but we can see the potential significance of a happy
ending, especially an easy one. In “Fire and Cloud,” on the other hand, an upbeat ending seems
to strengthen the story’s social criticism, for it suggests there is an alternative to accommodation
and despair—not only for Reverend Taylor but for anyone confronted with injustice.

Not just the ending of a story but the whole sequencing of events helps shape its meaning.
Imagine a plot about a married couple, Sue and Al, which consists of three major incidents: they
fight at home over a trivial matter; Sue has an angry dispute at work with a coworker over a
minor misunderstanding; Al goes to a bar and drinks heavily. A great deal, of course, would
depend on point of view and other matters, but we can probably make the following
comparisons with some confidence. If the sequence of events were Al’s drinking, then the
quarrel at home, then Sue’s blow-up at work, we might assume (in the absence of evidence to the
contrary) a certain causality—that Al’s drinking led to the quarrel, which upset Sue and made her
testy at work; we might have a story, then, about the evils of drink.
If, instead, the sequence were Sue’s dispute at work, then the fight at home, then Al’s drinking in
the bar, we might infer that Sue’s difficulties at work led to her fight with Al which in turn led to
his drinking—a story, perhaps, about the toll jobs can take on people, or, with an antifeminist
slanting, a story about what happens when women work outside the home. Alternatively, if the
fight came first, say at breakfast, and then simultaneously Sue went off to trouble at work and Al
went off to whiskey in the bar, we might have a story about the difficulties of marriage and the
unhappiness it can cause for both partners.
Staying with this last time sequence—the fight at home, then work and drink simultaneously—we
might speculate on what difference the order of narration might make. Were the drinking to come
last, we might expect (assuming, say, an omniscient narrator that revealed Sue’s and Al’s thoughts
similarly) to sympathize more fully with Al than with Sue, as the story would come to a close with
him alone in the bar with his thoughts. On the other hand, were the story to end with Sue,
frustrated and miserable at work, we might see it more as her story than his.

Use of flashback, in which the chronological flow of a narrative is interrupted to narrate a scene
that occurred earlier, might change our relative sympathy towards the two characters in other
ways. Suppose that we read first about Sue’s dispute at work, then, in a flashback, read about the
fight between Al and Sue earlier that morning, and then, finally, read about Al’s drinking after the
fight. While the story might devote equal time to Al’s drinking and Sue’s difficulties at work, we
would read about Al’s drinking with knowledge of its cause (the fight at breakfast) and thus with
more sympathy, while we would read about Sue’s testiness at work without knowledge of its cause
(for this knowledge would only come later in the story) and possibly just think her an irritable
person. On the other hand, if the story began with Al’s drinking, flashed back to the fight at
breakfast, and then moved on to the fight’s repercussions for Sue at work, we would probably
sympathize more fully with her. And since Sue and Al are, after all, fighting, it certainly matters
with whom we sympathize.

These are just a few of the ways that plot structure can shape our attitudes towards characters
and events in fiction. Other and more complicated kinds of plot are obviously possible, including
plots without discernible causality, the point of which might be that what happens to us in life is
random and meaningless. (We’d certainly get bored reading more than a few stories with such
plots.) Sometimes, too, parallels and contrasts between incidents, rather than links of causality,
can be the key to a story’s meaning. But however a work of fiction is structured, a good step
towards understanding its meanings is to chart its plot.

CHARACTER
Characterization, the means a writer uses to reveal what a character is like, can take many forms.
With an omniscient or limited omniscient narrator, a writer can describe a character directly:
“Harry Smythe was too confident for his own good. . . .” But with a participant narrator,
characterization can be more complicated: “I have always been an honest person. . . . Albert, who
got the promotion that rightfully was mine, is a sneak and a hypocrite.” As readers we would
have to weigh assertions like these against other evidence.

Writers cannot only tell but also show us what their characters are like. We can come to know
characters through what they do, or don’t do: bravery or cowardice, for example, or generosity or
selfishness are easily demonstrated through action. We can learn about characters through what
they say and, if we are privy to their thoughts, through what they think. In addition, we can learn
about them from what other characters say and think about them. And, of course, a combination
of elements can reveal character; we may, for example, understand characters’ hypocrisy only by observing
the discrepancy between their actions and their words. Finally, we can sometimes find clues to what
characters are like in incidental ways, through their appearance, perhaps, or even their name; in
fiction, unlike life, someone named Knightly (as in Jane Austen’s novel Emma) is likely to be of
noble character, while someone named Jesse B. Simple (as in Langston Hughes’s sketches) will
probably turn out to be, ironically, a sophisticated social critic.

Fictional characters are usually labeled as either major or minor characters. Major characters
are at the center of the plot and usually drawn in detail; minor characters are peripheral, sketched
quickly. The most important character in a work of fiction we call the protagonist, and if the
primary conflict is between that character and another, we call the latter the antagonist. Major
characters tend to be complex (or “round,” to use novelist E. M. Forster’s term); minor
characters tend to be simpler, often one-dimensional, or “flat.” Major characters, because they
often have conflicting tendencies within them, are more likely to be dynamic, that is to change
somehow in the course of a work of fiction; minor characters, too simply drawn to embody
conflict, tend to be static.

Discussion of flat characters leads to the issue of stereotypes. Fiction often relies on simple
characterization and, in short fiction, even the central character may not be very fully developed.
Consequently, we will often find characters outlined quickly, based on a single defining trait and
sometimes on commonly held assumptions about particular kinds of individuals: the lonely
spinster, the manly hunter, the mad scientist, and so on. Stereotyping can be useful, for it allows a
writer to sketch a character in a few quick strokes, with confidence that most readers will fill in
the details in a predictable way. But since we tend to see fiction as representative, as embodying
in specific characters general truths about human beings, such stereotyped characters can also
reinforce our worst prejudices, particularly about oppressed groups in society. It is one thing for
a writer to portray an accountant as dull or a professor as absentminded, and quite another to use
such stereotypes as the shrewish wife or the dumb blue-collar worker or the lazy welfare
recipient. Of course writers often create characters against type, as, for example, in Kate Chopin’s
“The Story of an Hour” (p. 313), in which traditional assumptions about a devoted wife are
proven quite wrong.

LANGUAGE AND TONE

A careful look, sentence by sentence, at the language of a work of fiction—the words chosen and
the way they are put together—can often help us understand what that work means. Writers
labor to make language serve their purposes, to produce the effects they desire, and what is
distinctive about the language of a writer or a work we call style.

One aspect of style, one important use of language in fiction, is the metaphor. In James
Baldwin’s story, “Sonny’s Blues” (p. 79), the narrator, a school teacher in Harlem, uses metaphor
to describe the boys in his class, boys without much future: “they were growing up with a rush
and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” The implicit
comparison or metaphor (an explicit comparison is called a simile) is between (1) growing up,
through no fault of your own, with little chance of success; and (2) bumping your head on a low
ceiling as you grow taller. It makes vivid and real, in few words, the painful nature of the trap
these boys are in.
Metaphors are one way writers use language to shape our attitude towards characters and events,
that is, one way they establish tone. The tone of the quote from “Sonny’s Blues” is primarily
sympathetic. There are other kinds of tone. The novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, by Stephen
Crane, begins like this:
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing
stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting
at him.
His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of
great, crimson oaths.

The tone here is mocking; Crane is making fun of the almost grotesque spectacle he is describing.
The “honor” being fought for is the honor of “Rum Alley,” fought for not by knights or soldiers
but by “howling urchins.” Crane’s language is ironic, in that he is saying one thing (that the boys
are fighting for honor) and meaning another (that Rum Alley is hardly the place to find honor).
Irony often joins with comedy and also scorn, as in the tone of the following passage, the
opening of “Slave on the Block,” a story by Langston Hughes:

They were people who went in for Negroes—Michael and Anne—the Carraways. But not
in the social-service, philanthropic sort of way, no. They saw no use in helping a race that
was already too charming and naive and lovely for words. Leave them unspoiled and just
enjoy them, Michael and Anne felt. So they went in for the Art of Negroes—the dancing
that had such jungle life about it, the songs that were so simple and fervent, the poetry that
was so direct, so real. They never tried to influence that art, they only bought it and raved
over it, and copied it. For they were artists, too.

Hughes, like Crane, is making fun of his characters, though with far less sympathy. Hughes does
not need to spell out his attitude towards the Carraways; his language creates a distinct tone of
mockery. “They saw no use in helping a race that was already too charming and naive and lovely
for words.” Both through their actions (buying art) and what are implicitly their thoughts (“too . .
. lovely for words”) we see the superficiality and phoniness of the Carraways’ admiration for
black people. By the time we get to the last sentence (“they were artists, too”) its irony comes
through with clarity and force.

Tone serves a different function in the opening of “Dotson Gerber Resur-rected,” a short story by Hal Bennett:

We saw the head of Mr. Dotson Gerber break ground at approximately nine o’clock on a bright Saturday
morning in March out near our collard patch, where Poppa had started to dig a well and then filled it in. Of
course, none of us knew then that the shock of red hair and part of a head sprouting from the abandoned
well belonged to Mr. Dotson Gerber, who’d been missing from his farm since early last fall.

Here the language is deliberately matter-of-fact. Bennett wants us to accept this unlikely event as real, so
his narrator describes it very simply, flatly, as if there were no reason in the world not to believe
it. The narrator moves quickly past the fantastic part, the head breaking ground, to a series of
quite ordinary details—the time, the day, the month, and so on. He draws us in further, towards
acceptance of this bizarre event, by starting the second sentence with “Of course.” This not only
sustains the matter-of-factness of his tone, but also says to us that he’s not the type who’d try to
put one over on us—he’d never claim they recognized the head.
The opening of The American (1877), a novel by Henry James, illustrates another use of language,
and a very different style:
 On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great
circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of
the Louvre. The commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all
weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts; but the gentleman in question had taken serene
possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was
staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture.

James’s language here creates a strong sense of social class. It is not just the scene described that
does this, but the way it is described, the implicit assumption that the reader understands, without
explanation, references to “the Salon Carré” and “Murillo’s . . . moon-borne Madonna,”
references most familiar in James’s day to a small class of people who could afford to travel to
Paris. The length and the slow pace of the sentences, too, suggest a world of refined leisure; their
stately rhythms surround the reader with the sense of a stable, established aristocratic order.
Compare this now to the opening of Waiting for Nothing (p. 619), Tom Kromer’s autobiographical
novel about a young man, jobless and hungry, during the Great Depression:

It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits a stick. I reach down and
pick it up. I finger it. It is a good stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out.

The difference here lies not just in the setting, the street rather than the Louvre, but in the
language used to describe the scene. The words are everyday words, mostly of one syllable (unlike
James’s), and expressions such as “this dark street” and “sock” are colloquial rather than formal
English. The sentences are short and grammatically simple; their broken rhythms create a sense
of almost reflex behavior, a focus on immediate survival, unlike the leisurely, contemplative
atmosphere James’s language creates.

These are just a few of the ways the particular language of a work of fiction shapes our reading
experience. Slow down and examine a passage or two as you read—perhaps an opening passage
or one that somehow grabs you—and see if you can figure out what the writer is up to.

THEME AND SYMBOL

Fiction is specific. It tells of specific characters in specific places doing specific things. But, if it is
to interest us very much, it should also be in some sense general, with implications beyond the
confines of the imaginary world it creates. What we can abstract from the specifics of a work of
fiction—its central idea or statement, what it is about—we call its theme. Since fiction is often
complex and open-ended, formulating the theme of a work of fiction is not simple. One reader
might argue that “Alice” is basically about appreciating when adults people we did not appreciate
when we were children. Another might see its theme as the ultimate connectedness of all women.
Trying to distill a theme from a work of fiction raises important questions about its essential
meaning and is therefore an important step in coming to understand it.

This complex embodiment of the general in the specific is also the basis of literary symbolism. A
symbol is an object (or person, setting, event) that suggests meanings beyond its literal meaning
in a work of literature. Some symbols are widely used and conventional such as a rose to
symbolize love, a physical wound to symbolize an emotional one; some are specific to a particular
work. Generally, a symbol, especially a nonconventional symbol, is open ended; that is, we
cannot give it one precise meaning. Much of the value of symbols in fiction lies in their open-
endedness, their complexity, but also in their economy and in the emotional power of indirection,
that is, of suggesting without saying.

In Bobbie Ann Mason’s story “Shiloh” (p. 290), for example, the historic Civil War battleground
Leroy and Norma Jean Moffitt visit suggests the waste and emptiness of their life together, the
death of whatever hopes they once shared, and the defeat Leroy is suffering. In Ralph Ellison’s
“Battle Royal” (p. 60), for the amusement of the white leaders of a Southern town, a group of
young black men fight each other blindfolded for a cash prize. They are then set to scrambling
for coins and bills on a rug, which turns out to be electrified and sends them lurching and
twitching across the floor. Though these grotesque games function on a realistic level to divide
and humiliate the young men, they also have symbolic implications—about the nature of white
promises, about the perils of trying to get ahead, about the plight of the black community. In
“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” a story by Herman Melville, the narrator
visits a paper factory, which has drained the life out of the young women who toil there. The
factory is described in terms that parallel pregnancy and childbirth, and these descriptions suggest
on a symbolic level something complicated and disturbing about the relationship between human
life and the technology that is supposed to serve it.

Symbols appear often in fiction, but it is very easy to overemphasize their importance, treating a
story as if it were a puzzle, its solution the discovery and explanation of symbols. Most things in
fiction are not symbolic. Writers usually highlight their symbols, whether through repetition or
positioning, and a predominantly symbolic interpretation of most works of fiction makes sense
only if it fits together with and enriches interpretation based on character, plot, and point of
view. Interpretations which reduce everything to abstraction and symbolism ignore the essential
value of fiction as the representation of lived human experience.

Symbolism returns us to the question of what “correctness” in interpreting fiction means. There
is no perfect or even best interpretation of a story; no amount of care, persistence, and
intelligence in examining plot, character, point of view, or symbolism will lead us to an ultimate
interpretation. Fictional texts cannot have meanings totally independent of readers; the act of
reading is, in a sense, an interaction between story and reader; jointly they create its meaning.

Thus fiction can have different meanings for different individuals, cultures, or eras. In the eyes of
some critics, Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd sanctions Captain Vere’s hanging of the naive
hero Billy, who has impulsively struck and unintentionally killed an evil man; they see as its theme
the necessity of enforcing the law. But for others, the novel is about the utter injustice of this
hanging, the essential difference between justice and law. For some readers, Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply racist novel; for others, it is a profound attack on racism.
And in any number of classic novels and stories, recent feminist critics have found the theme of
men’s and women’s roles where earlier readers have found studies of money or science or war.
But, again, none of this is to say that anything goes, that any reaction represents a valid
interpretation. Interpretation, as opposed to reaction, should be rooted in evidence and informed
by an understanding of how fiction works. It takes some effort, but trying to persuade others of
the rightness of your interpretation is one of the many pleasures of reading fiction.