3.4–Writing About Short Stories

When approaching the task of composing an essay about a short story, you may wonder what you are supposed to write about. You read the story, and you even feel like you have a good understanding of it. What now?

Generally speaking, when a college professor asks you to write an essay on a work of literature, they want you to write an argumentative essay. This means that your thesis, or central argument, should make some debatable claim. You should say something about the story that you can imagine some reasonable person disagreeing with. You might even think that most people would easily agree with your stance, as long as you can imagine some reasonable person who would dispute it. In other words, your argument should not be so obviously true that no one would disagree. If you were to write an essay arguing that Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a tale of revenge, that would not be a very interesting essay because your point is indisputable to anyone who has read the story. This does not mean, however, that you should only bother to make outlandish, sensationalist, or controversial arguments.

A good way to get started finding your argument is to ask questions about the story, particularly those without obvious answers. Focus on those aspects of the story that remain ambiguous after your first or second reading. For example, perhaps after reading Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” (1922) you’re left wondering why Rosemary takes the beggar girl home since she doesn’t seem like a particularly kind or giving character. You have a hunch that the action has more to do with how Rosemary feels about herself than with helping another person. Importantly, however, we cannot make our arguments based on mere conjecture. We must have textual evidence, or quotations from the text, to support any claims that we make. After sifting through the text, you find several passages that suggest that Rosemary’s thinking about the situation is primarily focused on herself. For example, she considers the incident like “one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage,” thus making her the protagonist of the story that she would tell later “to the amazement of her friends.” She even believes the story will show the girl that “fairy godmothers were real,” putting herself in the role of the magical and benevolent savior. However, what strikes you most is that the story begins with the narrator stating, “Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful,” and it ends with Rosemary sending the girl away after her husband remarks on the girl’s beauty. Now you’re ready to put these pieces together and make an argument. Your thesis may read as follows: “Rosemary’s generosity toward the girl is a self-serving attempt to make her feel good about herself, appeasing her insecurity about her physical appearance.” This is a debatable claim about the way Rosemary’s character flaw drives the plot of the story that you can support with evidence from the text. From there you can make claims about the importance of your observations for the larger meaning of the story. Based on your argument, you might say that the theme of the story is that seemingly selfless actions may often derive from selfish purposes.

To offer another brief example, consider my suggestions about the use of symbols in Jewett’s “A White Heron.” After reading the story, you may recognize that the heron is a symbol and begin asking what it represents. If you come up with several possible answers, like I did, you would then want to determine which of the possibilities is best supported by the text. The most valid claims are those supported with the most convincing textual evidence. Once you decide what you will argue that the heron symbolizes, you would then consider what ramifications it has for how you would interpret the meaning of the story.

Jewett’s story is an instructive example because each of my suggestions about possible meanings behind the symbol of the heron are valid, and they each produce very different approaches to the story as a whole. After all, this is why we continue to make arguments about literature. A good short story will not limit the reader to one correct interpretation but will instead offer multiple avenues for inquiry that open the story up to an array of possible meanings.