A Precarious Balance: The Opening Up of Short Story Sequence Theory

Abstract

While short story sequences belong to a Iiterary tradition that stretches back to ancient times, critical examination of the genre has begun only very recently. Forrest L. Ingram's working definition of the form, set forth in his Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (1971), has since been gradually broadened by the work of Susan Garland Mann and Robert M. Luscher. The most recent major addition to short story sequence theory is J. Gerald Kennedy's Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and FictiveCommunitie (1995). Kennedy, adopting an all-inclusive stance based on thepotentially infinite responses a reader may have to a given text, applies the word sequence to “all collections of three or more stories by a single author＂ (ix). He goes on to explore discontinuities in American author Raymond Carver's collection of short fiction Cathedral (1983), arguing that its stories work collectively to “imply the breakdown of communal relations in ordinary, middle-class experience＂ (xiv). On this basis, Kennedy solidly places Cathedral-heretofore not generally considered a sequence-in the sequence genre. Indeed, Kennedy's study opens up the genre to many story collections not yet examined in terms of their overarching elements and themes, and prompts us to re-examine the emerging, and rapidly-changing, body of sequence theory.