Story

The story, like literary sort, is a narration form whose extension in number of pages is smaller to the one than it could be considered appropriate for a novel. However, this is not something that can be considered to the detriment of this sort, since great authors like Borges, Cortazar or Jack London have showed with the unquestionable quality of their stories the huge potentials of this one.

The essence of the story consists of counting a history without reflecting it in all their extension, compacting it and putting the emphasis at certain moments, that usually are decisive for the development of the same, leaving to the imagination of the reader the mission to compose the details that could be considered “superfluous” and that, next to the facts narrated in the story, would compose a greater cadre, like in many of the stories of Raymond Carver. The facts narrated in the story can be of fiction (story, epic, etc.) or of not-fiction (the news). The story is a discursiva structure, characterized by the narrative heterogeneity, and in the body of a same story they can appear different types from speech.

We would define story like those narrations that we can write being fruit of the inspiration of the moment, although not always a story is the result of something immediate. There are stories that are planned in advance, although not so much as the one that can require a novel.

Certain authors settle down a difference between the “literary story” and the “story” (considering this one like the “popular story” traditional or the “stories for children”), but many students, contributors and writers of stories nowadays do not make any difference between both terms. However, we could say that a story usually includes fantastic elements that in a story would not be right to be, but this cannot either consider a division strict.

Bibliography

Dictionary of poetic rhetoric and, Mexico, Porrúa, 1992.

Outline Literature | Narratología