The Forms of Fiction: From the Fable to the Novel

Here is a complete story. It was written for this lesson, and it is forty-seven words long.

Ishimwe practised the speech for a week: in the mirror, to the goats, to the bean field. On the day, his voice shook, his notes slid to the floor, and the whole hall went silent. Then a small voice at the back called, "Start again." He did.

It has a character, a setting, a problem, a moment of crisis and a turning point. Now compare the first sentence of a book of about twenty-six thousand words:

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Stevenson spends a whole sentence on one minor character before anything happens; the forty-seven-word story cannot spare a word. Length is not just size. It changes what a story can do, and so fiction comes in several forms.

1The forms of fiction

Between the short story and the novella some writers also name a novelette (about 7,500 to 17,500 words). The word limits are conventions, not laws. The chart uses one widely used set of limits, those of the Nebula Awards for science fiction and fantasy, and places some of this course's texts on it. Each step on the scale is ten times the one before.

The American writer Edgar Allan Poe argued in 1842 that a short story should be read "at one sitting" and build towards "a certain unique or single effect". That is the real difference between the forms: a short story aims at one effect (surprise, fear, pity); a novel can build a whole world and follow a life.

2Two forms that mean more than they say

Allegory. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress opens like a dream:

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

The dreamer sees a man called Christian set out on a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. On the way he falls into a bog called the Slough of Despond and passes through a town fair called Vanity Fair. Every name explains itself: the bog is despair, the fair is the world's empty pleasures, the journey is a Christian believer's life. In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the animals of an English farm drive out their cruel farmer and promise equality, only for the pigs to become new tyrants; the story is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the dictatorship that followed. Its most famous line is the pigs' final rule: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

Parable. A parable is shorter and closer to ordinary life. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a man is beaten by robbers; two respected religious men pass by, and a Samaritan, a member of a despised group, stops and cares for him. The story answers the question "Who is my neighbour?" In Surah Al-Kahf, a man proud of his two rich gardens boasts to his poorer companion that his wealth will never perish, and his gardens are destroyed. Both parables teach through a story that the listener must apply to his or her own life.