Prose fiction: novel and short story
Analysing narrative method
Prose fiction in STPM 920 covers the novel and short story. The exam tests how narrative technique produces meaning: point of view and focalisation, narrative time, characterisation, setting, symbolism, structure and style. The short story adds the discipline of compression and the single effect.
Core rules
- Name the narrator and its limits: first or third person, omniscient or limited, reliable or not, retrospective or immediate.
- Distinguish story (what happens) from plot (the order and pace of disclosure); watch summary, scene, flashback and foreshadowing.
- Treat characterisation as technique: direct comment, dialogue, action, costume, foil and free indirect discourse.
- Ask what setting and objects symbolise, and how chapters or sections shape the reader's judgement.
- In short stories, note what is omitted and where the epiphany or final turn lands.
- Use context to illuminate, not replace, textual analysis.
Worked example
Consider an opening: "My father sold the house in the year the river dried." Reasoning: the first-person retrospective narrator frames a domestic loss against a natural one; the definite "the river" assumes shared knowledge and creates intimacy, while the balanced clauses imply parallel losses. The sentence is doing structural work: it establishes voice, setting and a causal pattern that the novel may test. That is a claim about method, not a summary.
Traps
- Retelling the story instead of analysing narration.
- Equating the narrator with the author.
- Ignoring shifts in focalisation or time.
- Quoting dialogue without commenting on its delivery or context.
- Treating a short story as a failed novel rather than a compressed form.