Tag Archives: short stories

Short Story Day Fifteen – Wiggle Room

Posted on by Bill Chance

15. Wiggle Room
David Foster Wallace
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace

This is day Fifteen of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

The massive, classic novel, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has been on my to-read list for a long time…, along with 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Underworld by Don DeLillo. But Jest is over a thousand pages, Underworld a tad over eight hundred and nine hundred for 2666. To tackle a tome of this magnitude takes a commitment of time I’m not sure I have (There aren’t that many years left) when so much shorter stuff is out there. Then again, I’ll always treasure Gravity’s Rainbow and Moby Dick and the other Big Long Books I’ve soldiered through. Who knows?

Today, submitted for your approval, is a short work by David Foster Wallace from the New Yorker. It’s a harrowing look at the soul-destroying numbness of working in a mindless modern cubical-cluttered workplace. Specifically, a midwestern backwater IRS office.

If it seems incomplete, it’s because it is. It is a snippet of Wallace’s last, unfinished novel, The Pale King.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide leaving The Pale King as a disorganized pile of paper and computer files. His friend and editor Michael Pietsch assembled the novel from that and it was published in 2011.

Before it came out, several selections were printed. The New Yorker also published a piece that’s still available online, Good People. It’s a completely different type of story (or snippet) even though it features the same character, Lane Dean, as today’s Wiggle Room.

Also, in the same issue, is a long article on Wallace, The Unfinished… it’s worth a read.

He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connect to nothing he’ll ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never goes down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices. Tell him to pucker his butt and think beach when he starts to get antsy-and that would be just the word they’d use, antsy, like his mother. Let him find out in time’s fullness what a joke the word was, how it didn’t come anyplace close. He’d already dusted the desk with his cuff, moved his infant son’s photo in its rattly little frame where the front glass slid a bit if you shook it. He’d already tried switching the green rubber over and doing the adding machine with his left hand, pretending he’d had a stroke and was bravely soldiering on. The rubber made the pinkie’s tip all damp and pale beneath it.
—-from Wiggle Room, by David Foster Wallace

Short Story Day Fourteen – Beyond the Door

Posted on by Bill Chance

14. Beyond the Door
Philip K Dick
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28644

This is day Fourteen of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

Though he never had any real financial success during his life, Philip K Dick was unquestionably one of the most unique, imaginative, and influential Science Fiction writers of all time. He has had at least ten films adapted from his work: Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. Most of his prodigious output could only find a printed home in low-paying magazines.

Some of his early fiction ended up in the public domain – and that’s where we find today’s little piece of pulp, Beyond the Door.

I’m not sure if the simple little lurid tale can be considered good… the characters are pretty cardboard, the action predictable, no real theme… but it’s a fun read anyway. It’s not a real good example of Philip K. Dick’s best work – his unique warped take on the slippery and ephemeral nature of reality and the inevitabilty of paranoia in modern life influenced a whole generation of modern and postmodern writers. I’ve always though of him as a readable Pynchon – as a Gateway drug into the world of fantastic paranoid literature and film.

In the weeks that followed after Doris left, Larry and the cuckoo clock
got along even worse than before. For one thing, the cuckoo stayed
inside most of the time, sometimes even at twelve o’clock when he should
have been busiest. And if he did come out at all he usually spoke only
once or twice, never the correct number of times. And there was a
sullen, uncooperative note in his voice, a jarring sound that made Larry
uneasy and a little angry.

But he kept the clock wound, because the house was very still and quiet
and it got on his nerves not to hear someone running around, talking and
dropping things. And even the whirring of a clock sounded good to him.

—- Beyond the Door, Philip K Dick

Short Story Day Thirteen – A Father’s Story

Posted on by Bill Chance

13. A Father’s Story
Andre Dubus

Click to access FathersStory.pdf

This is day Thirteen of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

This Sunday is Father’s Day – so I should rearrange my story order and have this one, A Father’s Story, moved to that day. Fuck it. I don’t hold much to the commercial holidays, the ones that are created simply to get people to buy gifts, stir the retail pot, make some cash – so I won’t stoop.

One interesting tidbit about Father’s Day – if you want to know where we stand. From Snopes – While Mother’s day is the biggest holiday for phone calls, Father’s day is the busiest day for collect calls. Yeah Dad, we’ll talk with ya, but you’re gonna have to pay for it.

Andre Dubus is a master of the short story. He writes without artifice… without messing around – he tells tales of humanity, of ordinary people faced with extraordinary moral choices and coming through them, without a perfect solution, but at least doing the best that they can. Then they have to wait and see if they can live with themselves.

Today’s story, A Father’s Story, is very good, read it and understand.

To add depth to the tale, read and understand a little bit about the author’s life. There is something to be said for the writer – like Pynchon or Salinger, that remains private so that his creations can live their lives on their own and you can judge them fairly and independently. But there is also something to be said for getting to know a little bit about the author, and trying to feel a bit about how he must have felt about putting the words down on paper.

Watch the youtube below and listen to the words of Andre Dubus III, the writer’s son (an author himself – he wrote the acclaimed House of Sand and Fog) as he talks about his father and compare him to the Luke character in the story, his love of opera, and open space, and his thoughts on being a human being.

In 1986, Dubus stopped on his way home to help a brother and sister. Their car had been disabled after hitting an abandoned motorcycle in the road. As he walked the injured sister to the shoulder, another car slammed into the three of them. The brother was killed and his sister survived because Dubus pushed her out of the way. Dubus himself was critically injured. He survived and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

I thought about how the accident had influenced the story, especially the harrowing scene when the father is trying to find out if the blonde boy in the ditch is alive or not. Then, I looked it up and realized the story was written three years before the author was involved in the accident.

A Father’s Story is about the author’s relationship with his daughter and how far he is willing to go to spare her suffering. It’s interesting what he says he would have done if it had been his son instead. But it is also about his relationship with God, and love, and imperfection, both human and divine.

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
—A Father’s Story, by Andre Dubus

Short Story Day Twelve – Paladin of the Lost Hour

Posted on by Bill Chance

12. Paladin of the Lost Hour
Harlan Ellison
http://harlanellison.com/iwrite/paladin.htm

This is day Twelve of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

Some stories are hard to put in a category – Science Fiction? Fantasy? Speculative Fiction? – I have a category I like to use for stories like today’s – Crackerjack. It’s a bit longer than the ones I’ve been linking to this month – but please read it… it’s worth it.

Paladin of the Lost Hour has an interesting history. The text fiction was written simultaneously with a screenplay of the same name for the new (1985) version of The Twilight Zone. When the story editor and a producer saw the script they liked it but suggested a change for the ending (the penultimate scene, apparently). Ellison immediately rejected the idea and an argument resulted. After a few days of thinking about it, the author realized they were right and rewrote the ending. Now, he admits the change made the story much better. Now, the revised version is the preferred one, and the one that is in print.

I would like to find the original… but haven’t yet.

I’ve been a fan of Harlan Ellison for as long as I can remember. His short stories, screenplays (remember, he wrote The City on the Edge of Forever, the best Star Trek episode ever)… even his anthologies (I think the reading the Philip José Farmer tale, Riders of the Purple Wage, from Ellision’s groundbreaking original Dangerous Visions is one of the highlights of my life) embody a courage that is lacking in so much… and something I would like to emulate.

Courage… something so rare, difficult, and always ephemeral.

Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.
—- Harlan Ellison, Paladin of the Lost Hour

Here is a youtube video of the Twilight Zone Episode. It’s one of Danny Kaye’s last performances. I’d recommend reading it first – there is an interesting mystery in the text that, obviously, has to be spelled out in the television performance.

Short Story Day Eleven – The Piece of String

Posted on by Bill Chance

11. The Piece of String
Guy de Maupassant
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/string.html

This is day Eleven of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

This weekend I went on a long bike ride, from North Dallas, down through White Rock and downtown, across the Jefferson Viaduct bike lanes into Oak Cliff and then down to Bishop Arts… then back.

Along the route, I stopped off at Klyde Warren Park for a rest (and a beer) and, as is my new habit, I read a bit in the Dallas Morning News reading area. I picked up a book I’ve picked up before, Volume I of Somerset Maugham’s collected stories.

This time I read the preface, which was as interesting as the stories themselves. He talked about how he writes – including the notes he took on a South Seas voyage about some fellow travelers that ended up as the story Rain.

Then he wrote eloquently and at length about the differences between two classic short story writers, Chekov and Guy de Maupassant.

I do not know that anyone but Chekov has so poignantly been able to represent spirit communing with spirit. It is this that makes one feel that Maupassant in comparison is obvious and vulgar. The strange, the terrible thing is that, looking at man in their different ways, these two great writers, Maupassant and Chekov, saw eye to eye. One was content to look upon the flesh, while the other, more nobly and subtly, surveyed the spirit; but they agreed that life was tedious and insignificant and that men were base, unintelligent and pitiful.

Maupassant’s stories are good stories. The anecdote is interesting apart from the narration so that it would gain attention if it were told over the dinner table; and that seems to me a very great merit indeed…. These stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. They do not wander along an uncertain line so that you cannot see whither they are leading, but follow without hesitation, from exposition to climax, a bold and vigorous curve.

On the face of it, it is easier to write stories like Chekhov’s than stories like Maupassant’s. To invent a story interesting in itself apart from the telling is a difficult thing, the power to do it is a gift of nature, it cannot be acquired by taking thought, and it is a gift that few people have. Chekhov had many gifts but not this one. If you try to tell one of his stories you will find that there is nothing to tell. The anecdote, stripped of its trimmings, is insignificant and often inane. It was grand for people who wanted to write a story and couldn’t think of a plot to discover that you could very well manage without one. If you could take two or three persons, describe their mutual relations and leave it at that, why then it wasn’t hard to write a story: and if you could flatter yourself that this really was art, what could be more charming?

We have already read Chekhov this month. Looking at that story – we see Maugham’s point. Nothing really happen’s in Gooseberries – there are simply three men, caught by a rainstorm, telling each other some stories. They aren’t even very good stories. And it keeps raining.

Yet it is still genius.

So what about Maupassant? His stories have a plot – you could tell them around a dinner table in your own voice and they would be interesting. His style is considered vulgar and cheap in some circles… but as Maugham says above – it’s really hard to do well.

And it is still genius.

In the public square of Goderville there was a crowd, a throng of human beings and animals mixed together. The horns of the cattle, the tall hats, with long nap, of the rich peasant and the headgear of the peasant women rose above the surface of the assembly. And the clamorous, shrill, screaming voices made a continuous and savage din which sometimes was dominated by the robust lungs of some countryman’s laugh or the long lowing of a cow tied to the wall of a house.

All that smacked of the stable, the dairy and the dirt heap, hay and sweat, giving forth that unpleasant odor, human and animal, peculiar to the people of the field.
—-The Piece of String, by Guy de Maupassant

Short Story day Ten – The Crawling Sky

Posted on by Bill Chance

10 – The Crawling Sky
Joe R Lansdale
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/spring_2011/fiction_the_crawling_sky_by_joe_r._lansdale/

This is day Ten of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

And now for something completely different….

After a few days of reading the crème of the postmodern, plotless, postmodern musing crop – we dive headfirst into that dreaded pool of purposeful words – the world of genre fiction.

I have very mixed feelings about the genres. I think it’s a mistake to set out to write a certain genre – especially if you are doing that because you have read somewhere that that is what is selling today. Your work will come out flat and unoriginal, plus I can’t imagine that it will do much to satisfy the ravenous monster in your brain that can only be fed by bleeding heartfelt words out onto the page (and if you don’t have a ravenous monster in your brain – why are you writing? There are better ways to spend your brief span upon this plane).

On the other hand, what if the truthful writing that spills out from your subconscious through your gray matter down your arms and out your fingertips… what if it simply happens to fit a certain genre? Well then, good for you.

When you read the horror fiction spilled out by Joe R. Lansdale, you can’t help but think that he was destined to write this – he has no real choice. I feel for him.

I’m not sure where I first heard of Joe R. Lansdale – though I’m fairly sure I was attracted to his writing because he is a native Texan (East Texas Piney Woods – to be exact). I do remember the first thing I read – an amazingly horrific little tale called, “God of the Razor,” and yes, it was all that.

Now, he doesn’t write only horror – not by a long shot. He is probably best known for his Hap and Leonard series of thriller/mystery/East Texas books. He is a serious student and teacher of the martial arts. One theme that runs through his books is his hatred of racism – I did read an excellent novel called A Fine Dark Line that deals with small town life and a drive in movie theater.

If you would like to try some of his work, his website has a section where he posts a new piece every week.

One of his short novels was adapted into the very entertaining movie Bubba Ho-Tep which finds Elvis alive and living in a retirement home with JFK (after the assassination “attempt” they replaced his brain with a “sack of sand” and dyed him “all over”). The two join forces to fight an evil cowboy mummy that is preying on the residents.

So that brings us to today’s selection, The Crawling Sky. It’s a mashup between a pseudo Western – East Texas Hillbilly Noir (I know there are no “hillbillys” in East Texas – there aren’t even any hills – but you know what I mean) intersecting with a Lovecraftian villian. Its hero is Jebediah Mercer, a preacher that has fallen from the faith and is wandering the west, fighting evil from beyond. The Reverend Mercer finds himself in Wood Tick, Texas – a town where all the women are weak, the men are ugly (the sheriff has a goiter slung in a dirty bag) and all the children are below average. After the world’s worst meal, he rescues a chained down prisoner from being stoned by the kids… and things go downhill from there.

The sky isn’t the only thing that’s crawling.

I love the Lovecraft style evil. It fits with my idea of a membrane between our ordinary life and the horrible void beyond. These stories are a little more literal than most in what can happen when this border is opened and crossed.

“There are monsters on the other side of the veil, Norville. A place you and I can’t see. These things want out. Books like this contain spells to free them, and sometimes the people who possess the book want to set them free for rewards. Someone has already set one of them free.”
“The sucking thing?”
“Correct,” the Reverend said, shaking the book. “Look at the pages. See? The words and images on the pages are hand printed. The pages, feel them.”
Norville used his thumb and finger to feel.
“It’s cloth.”
“Flesh. Human flesh is what the book says.”
—-From The Crawling Sky, by Joe R. Lansdale

Short Story day 9 – A 32-Year Old Day Tripper

Posted on by Bill Chance

9. – “A 32-Year Old Day Tripper”
Haruki Murakami
http://wednesdayafternoonpicnic.blogspot.com/2010/05/32-year-old-day-tripper_01.html

This is day nine of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

A very short piece – modern, non-plotted. If you want to get a feel for how important translation is, here’s an alternate translation and here’s another.

I have read quite a bit of Haruki Murakami – I think my favorite so far is his somewhat underappreciated Sputnik Sweetheart. His fiction is odd and slippery, sometimes sweet, sometimes horrific – always unpredictable.

If you are interested in his writing, don’t overlook his non-ficiton. I was impressed with Underground, a collection of interviews in the aftermath of the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack.

Today’s work by Murakami is a set of musings by a 32 year old man that has an eighteen year old semi-girlfriend (they meet one Sunday a month). Murakami began writing at age 29 – about the age of the narrator. Maybe the girl could be looked upon as representing his art – or maybe not.

His story of when he decided to write his first novel is amazing… From SPEIGEL – In April 1978, I was watching a baseball game in the Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the sun was shining, I was drinking a beer. And when Dave Hilton of the Yakult Swallows made a perfect hit, at that instant I knew I was going to write a novel. It was a warm sensation. I can still feel it in my heart. Now I am compensating for the old, open life through my new, closed life. I have never appeared on television, I have never been heard on the radio, I hardly ever give readings, I am extremely reluctant to have my photograph taken, I rarely give interviews. I’m a loner.

There is almost always a connection to music in his work – opera or western popular music. He owned a jazz club during the time he began writing. Like a lot of us (like me) he probably marks time with the music that he was listening to then – and certain songs bring back strong memories.

For example, a certain song and (especially) its video had been rattling around in my head from the 80’s. I remembered bits of it, and couldn’t shake it, but until I stumbled across the band mentioned in a Facebook group on an infamous old Dallas Nightclub (the Starck Club) I couldn’t remember what it was.

Here is the video:

Why has that stuck in my head for all these years?

Anyway… back to today’s story – I think it’s best not to try and overthink fiction like this. It’s best to let it sink in, read it a few times (on this one, read the other translations) and view it as a mood, or a crystal bit of emotion, or a wavy window into a specific time.

It’s actually the boringness of the girls that attracts them. They’re just playing a complicated game, a game they honestly enjoy. A game where they wash their faces with buckets full of the young girls’ boredom water, while they don’t let their lady friends have a single drop.
—-from “A 32-Year Old Day Tripper” by Haruki Murakami

Short Story day 8 – Thirteen Wives

Posted on by Bill Chance

8. Thirteen Wives
Steven Millhauser
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2013/05/27/130527fi_fiction_millhauser

This is day eight of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

Steven Millhauser is another contemporary, modern author that I have wanted to read. I have a couple (actual, real, paper) books of his short story collections very near the top of my to-read pile. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. I was very happy to see that this story, Thirteen Wives, was available on the New Yorker website – and added it to my June reading (and blogging) list.

Over the decades, the New Yorker has been one of the best, if not the best, consistent source for quality short stories. My only complaints are that they keep going back to the same writers again and again (though these are of unquestioned skill and even genius) – plus there has developed such a thing as a “New Yorker Story” – I wish they would work a little harder on introducing more diversity in their fiction – but I’m picking nits here. Hat’s off to the The New Yorker and their support of the short story as an art form.

Unfortunately, now, for the first time, I have come across a short story this month that I didn’t like. Thirteen Wives isn’t really a story – it reads more like an essay on the various aspects and complex dimensions of a marriage. Sure, it’s dressed up in the first person and the narrator pretends that the thirteen wives are actually different women (though he does say, “Never have I considered myself to be a man with thirteen marriages but, rather, a man with a single marriage, composed of thirteen wives.”) – but the author’s intentions are clear.

And he doesn’t go far enough. It comes across as a paean to marriage… which is OK, I suppose… but he doesn’t push it enough to make it interesting. He doesn’t deal very well with the aspect of time…. A marriage that lasts several decades is something beyond this story’s parameters – he does say he married these thirteen wives over nine years. Nine years is nothing.

As I read each section, I’m afraid my reaction was, “OK, that’s well written, a witty turn of phrase… but so what? Is that all?”

But that’s just me. Looking around the ‘net – I see folks that thought the story was excellent and exactly what they were looking for. Read it yourself, tell me what you thing.

It’s the peculiar fate of my thirteenth wife to evoke innumerable pasts that aren’t hers; she is composed of my memories of other women. To see her is to experience all the women barely noticed in public parks and crowded bus terminals, the half-seen women sitting at wrought-iron tables under the awnings of outdoor restaurants or waiting in line at ice-cream stands at the edges of small towns on hot summer nights, all the women passing on suburban sidewalks through rippling spots of sun and shade, the briefly stared-at women rising past me on escalators with glossy black handrails in busy department stores, the silent women reaching up for books on the shelves of libraries or sitting alone on benches under skylights in malls, all the vanished girls in high-school hallways, the motionless women in wide-brimmed hats standing in gardens in oil paintings in forgotten museums, the black-and-white women in long skirts and high-necked blouses packing suitcases in lonely hotel rooms in old movies, all the shadowy women looking up at departure times in fading train stations or leaning back drowsily on dim trains rushing toward dissolving towns. My thirteenth wife is abundant and invisible; she exists only in the act of disappearing.
—-Thirteen Wives, by Steven Millhauser

Short Story Day 6 – Gooseberries

Posted on by Bill Chance

6. – Gooseberries
Anton Chekhov
http://www.eldritchpress.org/ac/gooseb.html

This is day six of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

After a string of modern and post-modern works, we swing back to a classic master – Anton Chekhov. He wrote a prodigious number of stories on a wide variety of subjects, but all of them were uniquely his own unmistakable style. Often known more as a playwright, his masterly short stories may be his greatest achievement.

I have always been a fan of his famous story, The Lady with the Dog -(audio version). A few days ago, I wrote about Joyce Carol Oates. She produced a story, The Lady with the Pet Dog, which was a modern adaptation of the same tale, told from the point of view of the woman (with the dog). Together, the Oates and Chekhov versions make for some good reading and an interesting comparison.

Today’s story, “Gooseberries” is one of Chekhov’s later works, and is full of his characteristic ambiguity, moral questioning, and general good cheer. It is very attentive to the minutiae of daily life and the author manipulates these details to define and enrich the message and morals that he wants to convey.

Three men spend the day talking, and one tells a long “story within a story” which, on closer inspection has a very close relationship to the outer, framing story. The inner tale fails to interest the listeners, which makes the outer story that much more subtle and effective.

In the end, nothing much happens and nothing is decided… the rain continues to fall and the odor of spent tobacco keeps a character awake late into the night. The moral ambiguities are not resolved – the brother, eating his gooseberries that he thinks are delicious while the narrator confides are bitter – acts like a pig, but is undeniably happy in the way that a person can when his dreams come true.

I think that Checkov is ultimately telling us that this in how life is – there are no guarantees and victory is simply a slight shade away from defeat – happiness is elusive, but so are good works. Selfishness is evil, but charity is an illusion. All you can hope for is to muddle through – but maybe this is a miracle in itself.

“If I were young.”

He suddenly walked up to Aliokhin and shook him first by one hand and then by the other.

“Pavel Koustantinich,” he said in a voice of entreaty, “don’t be satisfied, don’t let yourself be lulled to sleep! While you are young, strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good! Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!”

Ivan Ivanich said this with a piteous supplicating smile, as though he were asking a personal favour.

Then they all three sat in different corners of the drawing-room and were silent. Ivan Ivanich’s story had satisfied neither Bourkin nor Aliokhin. With the generals and ladies looking down from their gilt frames, seeming alive in the firelight, it was tedious to hear the story of a miserable official who ate gooseberries. . . . Somehow they had a longing to hear and to speak of charming people, and of women. And the mere fact of sitting in the drawing-room where everything — the lamp with its coloured shade, the chairs, and the carpet under their feet — told how the very people who now looked down at them from their frames once walked, and sat and had tea there, and the fact that pretty Pelagueya was near — was much better than any story.

—-Gooseberries, by Anton Chekhov

Short Story Day 5 – Symbols and Signs

Posted on by Bill Chance

5. – Symbols and Signs, by Vladimir Nabokov
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1948/05/15/1948_05_15_031_TNY_CARDS_000214135

This is day five of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.

Today we have another little jewel – this one published by the New Yorker in 1948, Signs and Symbols, by Vladimir Nabokov.

It reads so up-to-date, it’s hard to believe the story is sixty-five years old, published almost a decade before Lolita.

I don’t know if anyone else gives a damn, but I have been enjoying reading, researching, thinking about in depth, and writing a bit about each work… even if I am essentially doing a homework assignment each day for fun.

This story is an interesting one – much more complex and deep than it appears at first. It’s well known and a lot has been written about it:

It fascinates me how a great work of literature can spawn so many analytical studies – each one several times longer than the story itself.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a concept spelled out in the last article in the list – that of the difference between Story and Plot. The Story is what actually happens in the work of literature, in real time chronological and casual order. The Plot consists of these same events presented in the order and manner that they are in the narrative. The way the reader learns of these events is irrelevant to the Story – but the wide variety of Plots that can be applied is essential to the artistry and emotional impact of the work.

What Nabokov does with the plot – with the way he presents the story – is what makes Symbols and Signs resonate with a power and complexity hidden in its short length. He is telling multiple stories with the same plot – at least two and maybe three.

One trick he plays is to withhold from the reader certain key information that is needed to make the story complete. There are many questions:

  • Exactly how did the son attempt suicide?
  • Why is there a wagon wheel hanging in a tree in the painting he is afraid of?
  • There are subtle changes in the story (the title for example) between the New Yorker version and the subsequent versions – what is the meaning behind this?
  • What is the meaning of the specific cards mentioned in the deck that falls to the floor?
  • What are the rest of the ten flavors of jelly?

…. and so on. But the biggest mystery and the most perplexing for the reader is – Who makes the third phone call at the end of the story? Is the girl making another wrong number? Is it the hospital calling to report their son’s death? Has the son escaped and is begging to come home?

There are clues throughout the text to help answer these questions – though they are hidden and impossible to be sure about. Remember, that in addition to being a famous writer (and expert on butterflies) Nabokov took great joy and interest in the composition of Chess Problems. He says, “The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness”. Nabokov believed that the “originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity” of creating a chess problem was related to his writing. We should not be surprised to find riddles within riddles hidden in the story.

But even without the mysteries and puzzles and mental gymnastics the short story is a compelling one. It is so sad – you feel so much for the old couple – poor, waiting to die, buying a birthday present for their mentally disturbed son. There is an air of helplessness, leavened slightly by Nabokov’s keen sense of dark humor.

Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

I think about the boy’s rare and terrible mental problem. He is crippled by the thought that the entire natural world is a series of coded messages and communications about him. He must examine everything carefully and completely, all the time, under the horror that the whole world is purposed simply to defeat him.

But what of the opposite? The son is paralyzed with the belief that he is the center and purpose of the universe – but isn’t it more of a horror to believe that the universe is completely uncaring and even unaware of your existence?

That’s the terrible truth of the parent’s life. And there is nothing they can do about it.

All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.
—-Signs and Symbols, Vladimir Nabokov