The Short Story and the Novel: Some Reflections on the Self and the Other
To analyse the humbleness in the fiction of Nirmal Verma, a master story-teller in Hindi, this article compares his short story “Under Cover of Darkness” (1957) with the novel A Rag Called Happiness (1979). Verma, like many other fiction writers, has often dealt with identical themes, or even charac...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2023
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | To analyse the humbleness in the fiction of Nirmal Verma, a master story-teller in Hindi, this article compares his short story “Under Cover of Darkness” (1957) with the novel A Rag Called Happiness (1979). Verma, like many other fiction writers, has often dealt with identical themes, or even characters, in his short stories and novels. The two texts discussed here have a child narrator who is unable to comprehend the world around him, besides several other similar characters. The article, analysing the two texts, attempts to address a series of questions. Does the form of the short story carry a space that is not easily available to the novel despite its ampler dimensions? In its brevity, in its ability to capture truth in a moment, does the short story offer an epiphany whose nature is different from that of the novel?This contribution tries to unravel the politics of humbleness associated with the short story and proposes that the term has been grossly unfair to the genre. A short story is a composition complete in itself, though it may, at times, act as a laboratory, a breeding ground for the novel. Examining the relation between the two forms, the percolation of the shorter narrative into the epic of the modern era, the author reflects upon the craft and narrative tools that Verma employs to lend a mystic veil to his short stories. |
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