Abstract
The aim of this article is to elucidate how the British novelist, William Somerset Maugham, exploited the dramatic devices such as Peripeteia and Anagnorisis as the focal devices in his short fiction. The short story, The Unconquered , is selected to pinpoint how Maugham set the stage for the Peripeteic downfall of his protagonist; as a result, the whole plot of the story will be dissected in the light of Aristotelian’s Peripeteia. Furthermore, the interconnection bond between Peripeteia and Anagnorisis, in correlation with the narrative structure, will be probed. Keywords: Creatures of Circumstance, The Unconquered, Aristotle, Peripeteia, Anagnorisis
Highlights
William Somerset Maugham’s last collection of short stories, Creatures of Circumstance (1947), is the riveting accounts of the dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, and murder, filled with eccentric Freudian cases and enigmatic detective stories
What is so intriguing about the Creatures of Circumstances is that the whole plot of the narratives depends on a sole climactic moment, which usually happens at the end of the narratives
Several other short stories of Maugham follow this same pattern; I aimed to do a reading of one of his works, which was in the collection, in order to elucidate Maugham’s technique in writing his short fiction
Summary
William Somerset Maugham’s last collection of short stories, Creatures of Circumstance (1947), is the riveting accounts of the dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, and murder, filled with eccentric Freudian cases and enigmatic detective stories. The Mother, A Woman of Fifty, Episode, The Point of Honour and The Unconquered are the short stories which the dramatic devices are used excessively. It should be noted that “before turning to the short story Maugham was a successful dramatist, and much of his best work reflects this earlier preoccupation” (Hanson 49); it would not be illogical to study one of his short stories in the light of a dramatic device. Several other short stories of Maugham follow this same pattern; I aimed to do a reading of one of his works, which was in the collection, in order to elucidate Maugham’s technique in writing his short fiction
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