ENGL 4310

I keep thinking about the article Neena handed out to the class on Tuesday, and I've decided that I agree with Poe. I think short stories may be one of my favorite genres simply for the reason that they produce a "single effect" without cessation. When I read, I often become engrossed in the story, as I'm sure many of us do, and when this happens in a novel, I inevitably have to set it down and this abruptly takes me out of the story. Even though I can still think about it, I don't feel engrossed in the plot anymore and when I do have a chance to revisit the novel, the effect is not the same because it takes me a while to get back into the swing of things and, often times, I even have to re- read the previous chapter in order to refresh my memory. So, for me, the short story does produce a "single effect," whereas the novel produces multiple effects as a result of multiple readings.

I was also thinking about how little kids like to see the same movie multiple times or hear the same bedtime story over and over, and I wonder if it just comes from a comfort of knowing what will happen next. When I read a short story for the second time, there are very few things I forget since the first time and so I feel confident to explore other avenues that I may have previously missed. Conversely, when I re-read a novel for a second time, there is so much information that I missed the first time, and so I feel like I have to read a novel more than two or even three times in order to grasp everything. Neena talked in her blog about how a short story is kind of in between a novel in a poem. In a poem, every word and punctuation counts and must be considered when doing an analysis. In a novel, every word and action may be important, but it cannot be analyzed the same way as a poem. The short story, however, allows the author to emphasize certain things that are more likely to grab the readers' attention because there isn't as much information to process. This allows the reader to explore every aspect of the story, which would be incredibly difficult to do with a long novel.