The logic of life narratives in short fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the manner in which we impose the logic of short fiction on life narratives, and more broadly, the intertwining of the way that we understand fiction and the way that we understand reality. The subject matter ranges through Jean-Paul Sartre’s suggestion that the moral acts are like the creation of works of art through Ian Hacking’s notion of criminals ‘acting under description’ and Richard Sennett’s discussion of the narratives that downsized IBM employees place upon their redundancies. Parallel to this runs the examination of fictional life narratives found in Alan Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried. These disparate elements are united through their reliance on plausibility, agency and event, which are not only features of short fiction but also the very limits of the stories we tell about ourselves.