Brief Introduction

• A piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained
incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood.

• A literary form first emerged in Europe in the 19th century Europe and America, Defined as stories
that can be read in one sitting and that do not take more than 10 to 30 minutes to read.

• Brevity, a most salient feature

• Should be able to express more than what it says.

• Earliest writers : Anton Chekhov, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway etc.
Main Characteristics of a short tory
• Length: Can be finished in one sitting; Short stories typically range from 1,600 to 20,000 words.
• Edgar Allen Poe suggested that a short story should take 30 minutes to two hours to read.
• Setting: Limited time and place

• Plot: Only main plot, no subplots as found in novel/play

• Subject: Short stories usually focus on a single subject or theme.

• 'In medias res': Short stories usually take place in a single setting and begin 'in medias res',( 'into
the middle of things‘)

• Limited number of characters: Due to the limitations of the genre, short stories typically focus on
just one or a couple characters.
Main elements of a short story
• Setting
• Character
• Plot
• Conflict
• Theme
• Point-of-view
• Tone
• Style
Cont.
• Setting:
• Where and when is the story set? Setting represents both the physical location but also the time
(i.e. past, present, future) and the social and cultural conditions in which the characters exist.

• Character:
• A person or animal or really anything personified. There can be one main character or many,
and often there are secondary characters, but not always.

• Plot:
• The plot consists of the events that happen in the story. In a plot you typically find an
introduction, rising action, a climax, the falling action, and a resolution. Plot is often represented
as an arc. To learn about plot in detail, read the article: “What is a Plot.”
Cont.
• Conflict:
• Every story must have a conflict, i.e. a challenge or problem around which the plot is
based. Without conflict, the story will have no purpose or trajectory.

• Theme:
• Idea, belief, moral, lesson or insight. It’s the central argument that the author is trying to
make the reader understand. The theme is the “why” of the story.
Cont.
• Point-of-view:
• “Who” is telling the story? First person (“I”) or third person (“he/she/it”). Limited (one
character’s perspective), multiple (many characters’ perspectives) or omniscient (all knowing
narrator). Second person (“you”) is not often used for writing stories.

• Tone:
• The overall emotional “tone” or meaning of the story. Is it happy, funny, sad, depressed? Tone
can be portrayed in multiple ways, through word and grammar choices, choice of theme,
imagery and description, symbolism, and the sounds of the words in combination (i.e. rhyme,
rhythm, musicality).

• Style:
• This is how things are said. Word choices, sentence structure, dialogue, metaphor, simile,
hyperbole. Style contributes significantly to tone.
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 an
Elephant
Mizanur Rahman
Faculty
Institute of Modern Languages
University of Dhaka
Depressing tone in The School by Donald
Barthelme
• words like "death" and "depressing" set a negative or unhappy tone:

And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don't know why they died, they just died.
Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn't
the best. We complained about it. So we've got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her
own little tree to plant and we've got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these
little brown sticks, it was depressing.
Conflicts
• All conflict falls into two categories:
• internal and external.

• Internal conflict is when a character struggles with their own

opposing desires or beliefs.

• External conflict sets a character against something or someone

beyond their control.
Different types of conflict
• Character vs self
• Character vs character
• Character vs nature
• Character vs supernatural element
• Character vs society
• Character vs technology
• An example of a casual tone is:

The way I look at it, someone needs to start doing something about disease. What's the big
deal? People are dying. But the average person doesn't think twice about it until it affects
them. Or someone they know.

• A formal tone is shown in this example:

There was a delay in the start of the project, attributable to circumstances beyond the
control of all relevant parties. Progress came to a standstill, and no one was prepared to
undertake the assessment of the problem and determination of the solution.
Story vs Plot
• A story is a sequence of events, and these may be fictional or real.
• You can create them, imagine them, remember them. When we tell
someone ‘this happened to me today’, we are telling them a story.
• It helps to think of a story as a journey that starts in one place and
ends up somewhere else.
• All the fiction we write has a story at its heart. To create a story,
imagine a sequence of events: Beginning, middle, end.
• By the end, something has changed – your character’s life,
circumstances, emotions – and whatever that is will give you a clue
about how you plot your fiction.
Story vs Plot
• Plot is a literary device that enables you to tell your story. Once you
have a story in mind, you can decide how you are going to plot it.

• Plot is not only about how you handle the events in your story, but
how you hold a reader’s interest.
• When you are creating a plot for your story, you will have to consider
things like: what happens when; when to reveal information; when to
withhold information; when to introduce a character and what to
show about them that will add to the story you are telling.
Plot of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K.
Rowling
• J.K. Rowling is a master plotter. In her Harry Potter series, we meet
Harry and, soon thereafter, two characters who go on to become his
closest friends. Once the introduction is established, we learn of
Harry's quest to secure the Sorcerer's Stone.

• As for the conflict, Professor Snape is also after the Stone. In a

climactic moment, Harry and his friends defeat an evil troll released
by Professor Snape. Although resolution is achieved when Harry
secures the Stone, the series is able to continue on with six more
books.
Plot of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

• In this classic by Charlotte Brontë, we meet Jane straight away. Her

backstory is established as an orphaned girl who attends a treacherous
boarding school. Immediately, we discern she's a very strong character. As
for the rising action, we watch Jane go on to become governess, or teacher,
at a great manor in England. There, she meets and falls in love with Mr.
Rochester.
• For the climax, just as they're about to wed, Jane learns about Mr.
Rochester's first wife, who's still alive, albeit imprisoned due to her
insanity. In the falling action, Jane moves away and we watch her settle
into her new life with her cousins. The story comes to a "happily ever after"
resolution when Jane and Mr. Rochester reunite and are able to marry,
once and for all.
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Self check
• Who is the writer of the story?
• What do you know about him?
• Do you need to know the personal details, attitude, political and social ideologies, personal and
professional life etc of the writer while reading a short story and novels? Why?
• What is the setting of the story?
• How many characters are there in the story?
• Who is the protagonist of the story?
• What is the storyline/ plot of the story?
• What is the conflict?
• What is the climax?
• What are dominant themes of this story?
• What type of characteristics does the protagonist demonstrate?
George Orwell
• Pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair
• Born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950,
London, England,
• English novelist, essayist, and critic
• Famous for his novels
• Burmese Days (1934)
• a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and
narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the
Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy.
• Animal Farm (1945)
• “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
• Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) ,
• a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.
• In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and
on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial
police.
• Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his
mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt
by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe.
• Donning ragged clothes,
• he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and
beggars;
• he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and
restaurants;
• he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of
the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.
• The protagonist a young policeman
• explicit or straightforward expository language
• Explicit inner conflict of the author
• This fear of ridicule is the central motivation that drives Orwell
through the story.
• Not afraid of being attacked or physically hurt but of being laughed at.
• Humiliation is an entirely psychic injury, unlike most other forms of injury. Nothing is lost
from humiliation apart from personal pride.
• While Orwell may theoretically be opposed to his position as a police officer in Burmese
society, he is driven to uphold it out of fear of ridicule.
An Allegory
• The actual shooting of the elephant works as an allegory for the British
colonial project in Burma.
• Orwell feels that it's wrong to kill such a large and wild animal. This feeling
represents the guilt of attempting to commandeer an entire culture and
society.
• On top of this, shooting the elephant does not kill the elephant; just as
policing Burmese society does not put them under the colonizer's control.
• Orwell puts multiple bullets into the elephant, but in the end he has to
leave to bleed to death. This scene reflects the nature of colonial power of
Burmese society: the British are incapable of ultimately fulfilling the
punitive end of their project in Burma.
Symbols
• The policeman
• As a police officer, Orwell's presence holds symbolic power within Burmese society.
• The Burmese people at once despise him, ridicule him and expect him to perform on behalf of the empire that he
symbolizes.
• When he goes to shoot the elephant, he does so as a police officer representing British colonial authority.
• The people expect him to demonstrate this authority. If he fails, the British imperial project will be shown to fail.
The policeman, in this way, upholds the image of the authority that it represents.

• The Elephant
• The rampaging elephant is a symbol of Burmese society: unwieldy, untethered and ultimately impossible to
subdue.
• Burmese people as having a particular power over their colonizers
• In the way that the elephant runs amok, and is impossible to contain without violence, the Burmese defiance of
British rule is a constant, making itself known by jeers and humiliation.
• In the way that "the white man" or British officers in Burma must rely on force, and specifically on torture, to have
the upper hand of the Burmese people, so Orwell must fall back on an unnatural use of force to demonstrate his
power over the elephant.
• When we see him shooting the elephant, we are seeing the same demonstration of force the British imperialists
use over the Burmese peo
• The tortured body symbol
• Early in the essay we see an image of a naked, scarred buttocks of a prisoner. This image has a symbolic function
that resonates through the essay. The beaten flesh of the Burmese prisoner represents the power structure at play
in the broader essay.
Themes
• British Imperialism
• Fear of Humiliation
• Colonial resentment
• Taming of Colonized Burmese
• Power dynamics
• “Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against
their oppressors, the British…”
• “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.”
• “I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter
silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East.”
• “All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my
rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.”
• “He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up
bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them
into his mouth.”
• “It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying
a huge and costly piece of machinery—and obviously one ought not to do it if it
can possibly be avoided.”
• “And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that
I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in
the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the
unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in
reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those
yellow faces behind.”
• “For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to
impress the ‘natives’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the
‘natives’ expect of him.”
• “But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch
of grass against his knees, with that pre-occupied grandmotherly air that
elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.”
Thanks for your
time and patience