thoughts about short stories

20-Jul-2024

Far too many times, I sit down with the intention to write about something I thought obvious and apparent—something fundamentally human—only to fail to put the thought into words. Whether the topic is about love or melancholy or brotherhood, those concepts are only apparent at first glance.¹

I find that such a phenomenon is not limited to singular themes such as “love.” Whole rebuttals may appear obvious but are difficult to explain within a traditional academic paper. We have a shared idea of what those words refer to but when prompted to articulate them, it becomes embarrassingly obvious that what is clear in our mind is—at best—murky on paper.

I find that this is a limitation with “traditional academic papers.” Perhaps it is the circles I run in, but it seems like we only expect serious discourse from “serious formats”—the stereotypically rigid paper with a formal tone, lack of colloquialisms, and plenty of heavy citations. But this was not always the case and poses as a real limitation to intellectual exploration.

Human beings think in narratives. A cursory Google search reveals how universal that sentiment is and even empirically, it makes sense given that storytelling is the primary mechanism that children are initially educated through. Fables taught morality and Epics taught virtue; recently, we have even developed narratives around numbers to teach children mathematics.²

In-line with this, we understand how stories function as a vessel for wisdom. Criticize it as we may, the Bible and other religious texts such as the Quran³ are very much emblematic of how a story can represent durable lessons.⁴ For more secular examples, we can refer to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as rebuttals to the Soviet system/ideology or rise of Nihilism respectively.

A word on the latter. Early in the novel, the protagonist Raskolnikov rejects God and commits murder based on the belief that a “great man” was qualified to make radical decisions for the greater good of society. The events which then transpire are explorations of the torment, regret, and emptiness that plague Raskolnikov following his unforgivable act. Through this story, Dostoevsky rebukes the notion of an Übermensch and the dangers of self-justifying ideologies writ large.

Certainly, such polemics are possible sans narrative, but I believe that literary works are uniquely effective in clarifying complex ideological criticisms or experiences. I consider stories legitimate and cogent forms of reasoning. They may be less succinct than a focused paper, but they’re effective in capturing the essence of human experiences and—quite frankly—are a form of writing I too rarely engage with. That in itself seems like a good enough reason for me to continue writing them.