Features of Fiction Short Story and the Link with Fantasy - Literature review Example

Summary Paper Fiction is often mistaken as being synonymous with fantasy, something that can not, willnot and has not been true. And in some respects, this assessment is true as the very definition of fiction indicates it is “an imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented” or “a literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact” (“Fiction”, 2000). While fantasy can be considered a sub-category of fictional literature, the underlying unifying principle of quality literature is its ability to focus, whether in this world or a completely imagined one, on fundamental and timeless human concerns. By freeing itself of fact, proof and even dimension, fiction can often illustrate truths better than fact and to a much greater degree as the reader is forced to ‘live through’ the lived actions and consequences of a given circumstance. Because choices are based upon a familiar theme, such as love, kindness or what it means to be human, they transcend time, space and, on occasion, the need for scientific reality. The capacity to reveal human nature within fiction is especially true when demonstrating various ways of life, or aspects of social culture. Quality fiction, regardless of when it was written or the length of the written text, can reveal significant aspects of human nature and thus reveal us to ourselves as we identify various elements of the story with our everyday lives. Literature such as “The Lottery” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” remind us that there are elements within society that tend to dehumanize us while other stories such as “Sonny’s Blues” begin to introduce the solution to this effect, a relationship that will be examined in the following discussion. In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” the story illustrates how people can get so completely caught up in following the customs and practices of their culture that they lose the meaning of the action. The history provided of the lottery within the story is sketchy at best as people begin gathering around a black box and organizing in a strict patriarchal hierarchy. The discussion of the lost original paraphernalia emphasizes the degree to which much of the original history has also been lost: “At one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery; a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year … but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed to lapse” (119). While there is a subtle hint that perhaps the lottery is tied up with ancient traditions of fertility and the harvest, this is as close to the history or usefulness of the lottery as the story gets. Although there doesn’t seem to be much of the original materials, practices or meaning of the lottery available to the reader, the degree to which people have become slaves to tradition is emphasized in the idea that the villagers themselves also seem unsure of the tradition. As the drawing gets underway, there is some talk in the crowd that there are other villages thinking about getting rid of the lottery. Mr. Adams brings up the subject to Old Man Warner who immediately scoffs at the foolishness of such new ideas. According to Old Man Warner, there has always been a lottery and this is, apparently, reason enough for it to continue. No tangible or spiritual reasons are offered for its continuation while it would seem the emotional attachment to a meaningless practice would be far outweighed by the emotional losses of mothers, daughters, husbands and sons as the lottery is played out. While people within the village have questioned the reasons for the lottery, they remain dedicated to its practice as the victim is finally selected. “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (123) as Tessie is stoned to death. Although today’s world is no longer accustomed to using physical stones as a means of beating a sacrificial offering to death, it remains true that people in the modern world continue to devote themselves to meaningless ceremonies and practices that can often have detrimental impact on the family unit or social relationships. Today’s world is increasingly globalized, meaning various people of different cultures and belief systems continue to come into closer contact with each other. As this continues to happen, individuals begin to understand that many of the things they’ve always taken for granted as a ‘natural’ way of doing things is not necessarily considered so natural in other parts of the world and forces us to begin questioning what makes us so sure that our way of doing things is the ‘right’ way. This concept is perhaps most evident in the arena of religious practices although it is by no means exclusive to this arena nor universally applicable. In encountering people of other beliefs, it is sometimes the case that the individual will adamantly defend their faith as the only one and true faith without ever having examined why they believe this to be so. In much the same way, there are people within the business world that have firmly held beliefs regarding how things should be done who find it difficult to question the efficiency or effectiveness of their efforts or to change the status quo. However, just like in “The Lottery”, there are a number of ways in which the traditional ways of looking at things are requiring a new approach. While there is nothing wrong with believing in a particular faith, it is important today to understand why you believe these concepts so that you are not sidetracked into some warped version of the original just as in the business world, when something isn’t working or could perhaps be done better, it is foolish and ultimately self-defeating to refuse to examine the issue and consider change. Herman Melville’s story about “Bartleby the Scrivener” illustrates how acceptance of custom and tradition without meaning eventually leads to the death of passion, without which we cannot live. Throughout the story, about all we can learn about Bartleby’s motives is that he’d ‘rather not’. His initial introduction into the office of the narrator seems to start off right as Bartleby proves himself to be an efficient and industrious worker and careful with what he does. The detail of his work is indicated by the narrator as he says, “I can readily imagine that, to some sanguine temperaments, it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet, Byron, would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say, five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand” (991). However, Bartleby seems to lose his enthusiasm and his will to live, gradually determining that he’d ‘rather not’ do anything but waste away into nothingness. Although his repeated phrase begins as a refusal to participate in a fundamental activity involved with his job, Bartleby’s refusal to participate gradually increases to include performing any work at all, to leave the lawyer’s office or even to move from the building after its new tenants threaten the police. The reason for Bartleby’s sudden apathy and loss of passion is hinted as being connected to his involvement with the ‘dead letters’ office in which the lost messages between people were destroyed. “Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?” (1011). Yet it seems that at least a portion of Bartleby’s despair stems from the constant checking and rechecking of his careful work. No matter how hard he works, no matter how careful he is and no matter how much he manages to prove himself, he will not be able to be more than a scrivener who must constantly engage in repetitive, unchallenging work with a constant doubt thrown over his best work. As we slowly sink into upholding traditional ideas and practices that no longer have meaning for us, we begin to fall into a pattern of habit that becomes mind-numbing. It is through the realization that all our work and effort is unappreciated and can never get any better than it has been yet still remains somehow not good enough to escape further verification that our passion for our work and our life tends to die. As long as we feel there is a chance for us to break out of the mold and to do something stupendous and meaningful, at least for ourselves, we are okay. Despite our best efforts, though, the monotonous and ungratifying daily activities of life eventually begin to wear us down and kill our passion for our jobs and other activities, particularly when we are not climbing the corporate ladder or advancing in other ways as quickly as we might wish. Other activities fall into this category as well, such as just about anything falling under the category of housework. Regardless of how well it’s done, there is always some element that could have been done better, that remains dirty or that is dirtied immediately after it’s been cleaned. It is thankless work that is merely expected and never rewarding and can tend to lead to this same apathetic behavior that, expanded greatly and applied universally, can lead to the sort of ‘rather not’ behavior exhibited by Bartleby. The one thing Bartleby didn’t have that most people in life do have is alternate reasons to keep going. We have houses to work on and fix up, we have families to engage in various activities with, we have hobbies and talents that we choose to pursue outside of work. Thus, we manage to pull a sense of accomplishment and progress from a variety of sources to the point where there is rarely one failure that manages to so depress us that we fall into the kind of fading out experienced by Bartleby. While the lack of a connection with anyone contributed to Bartleby’s destruction, the presence of someone being willing to try begins to provide hope for Sonny in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Although his early relationship with his brother is not revealed until well into the story, the narrator of the story remembers that he was unable to listen to Sonny when they were younger, which probably contributed to his brother’s isolation and drug use, a behavior pattern that closely mimics that of Bartleby. Just after their mother died, the narrator remembers a conversation he had with his brother regarding having Sonny stay with Isabella, the narrator’s new wife, and her family while the narrator finishes out his term with the Army. Sonny begs his brother to send him out of Harlem by allowing him to join the Navy, providing several hints in the process that something is seriously wrong, but the narrator doesn’t listen to him. Sonny hints at trouble in the neighborhood when he says “At least, I ain’t learning nothing you’d want me to learn.” The brother doesn’t stop to find out what Sonny’s learning or explore what the problems might be because he’s caught up in the type of automatic behavior exhibited by the people of “The Lottery.” Instead of trying to make a connection with his brother that might have solved the problem, in this remembered incident, the narrator acts as the narrator lawyer does in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” by simply pursuing his own path. While the narrator obviously only has Sonny’s best interests in mind, he is blind to the particular problems Sonny is facing. This is what Sonny refers to when he tells his brother, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say.” Sonny might have had the same sort of fate as Bartleby but for two significant differences. The first was that he had his music and was able to express his emotions and make musical connections with people through the sounds coming out of his piano. The other important difference was the much more meaningful connection he was finally able to make with his brother by inviting him to come hear Sonny play. “I sensed, I don’t know how, that I couldn’t possibly say no,” the narrator says, finally coming to the realization that he must hear his brother before he can hope to help him. Although he’s never understood Sonny’s music before, the narrator agrees to try and Sonny tells him, “There’s no way of getting it out – that storm inside.  You can’t talk to it and you can’t make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody’s listening.  So you’ve got to listen.  You got to find a way to listen.” The narrator’s ability to finally understand what is being said through Sonny’s music later that evening and Sonny’s reception of the message sent through the Scotch and milk, suggests a more understanding future both for the brothers and for the reader capable of applying these ideas to his or her own life. In Sonny’s inability to escape the rhythms of Harlem or to make a meaningful connection with another soul, he became lost in the world in much the same way that many people today are becoming lost in the postmodern isolation of digital and virtual reality. The first thing that saves him is his discovery of music and his ability to express himself through it. Whether it is music, art, parasailing, skydiving, woodworking or handyman, everyone should have some means of expressing their inner feelings and emotions for their own enjoyment and release as well as to remind themselves what it means to feel human. Baldwin’s story makes this abundantly clear. However, in order for this expression to provide what is necessary for human survival, there must be a connection made with another human being – someone must rightly understand the expression and care enough to really listen to what is being said. The corporate world doesn’t provide much room for this type of thinking, but being willing to actually listen to problems and willing to take an open-minded approach to them can often bring about much more favorable results in much shorter time. The lack of connection with anything meaningful as seen in the story of Bartleby and in the early story of Sonny has only become more pronounced in current times. As we respond in greater numbers to the pressures of the globalized, corporatized world, we can feel ourselves becoming more and more like a line of automated robots, following in lock step the prescribed patterns set forth no one knows when or where. Literature such as “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin provides us with some answers as to how to avoid the emptiness of Bartleby or the automatic response of the villagers in “The Lottery.” Sonny found his means of staying alive by expressing his feelings through his music, illustrating the importance of retaining passion, and through the emotional communication breakthrough he has with his brother at the end of the story. By comparing these three pieces of literature, it seems a very important lesson can be learned. To truly care about another human being, you have to care about who they are rather than what they do or how much money they make doing it. Before you can care about who they are, you have to be willing to make an emotional connection with them that is based not on what is expected or the automatic responses of our automatic society, but on what is being expressed by them outside of the constraints of the corporate or high-tech world. Before you can make this emotional connection, you must understand their passion and before you can understand their passion, you have to have a passion of your own. Without passion and connection, we become automatic responders in society as was seen in “The Lottery” and gradually fade away into nothingness as was shown in “Bartleby the Scrivener.” However, with passion and connection, as is shown in “Sonny’s Blues,” some of the most difficult problems can be overcome, connections made and creative solutions discovered. Works Cited Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. R.V. Cassil & Richard Bausch (Eds.). 6th Ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. “Fiction.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. (4th Ed.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery.” (1949). Printed in Mercury Reader. Melanie Rubens. Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2007. Melville, Herman. “Bartleby the Scrivener.” (1853). Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Fiction. 11th Ed. James H. Pickering (Ed.). New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Read More