SHORT STORIES -

DISCUSSION
BY MRS. ALICIA SOLIVIO
 ELEMENTS OF THE SHORT STORY

1. Setting
2. Characters
3. Point of View
• 1st person POV
• 3rd person limited POV
• 3rd person omniscient POV
4. Plot
• Introduction/Exposition/Basic Situation
• Rising Action; complications
• Conflict (Internal – man vs. himself; external – man vs. man,
man vs. nature, man vs. society)
• Climax
• Falling Action/denoument
• Resolution; ending
5. Symbols
6. Theme
 THE SADNESS COLLECTOR

• Setting: Family house, modern times

• Characters: Rica, her father, an imaginary
character: The Big Lady
• Conflict: Rica misses her mother who left to
work as a DH in Paris; she is always sad
although she tries hard not to be sad so Big
Lady would not burst from eating her
sadness
• Big Lady – this character comes from Bicol
folk custom. Children who are picky eaters
or who refuse to eat are told that Big Lady
will come at night to eat their uneaten food.
• Point of View: 3rd person limited
• Topic: Diaspora, dislocation, displacement
• Diaspora - a Greek term originally coined to
describe the experience of the Jewish people.
• Undergoing diaspora means to re-examine the
meaning of home, its different senses of where,
what, and how.
 WRITING ASSIGNMENT:
WHAT IS HOME?
• Re-examine what home means to you. What is
home? Where is home? How is the situation at
home? Has your family been affected by the
Filipino diaspora?
• Write a one-page composition on Notebook #2
(Green notebook)
 THE TELL-TALE HEART

• by Edgar Allan Poe

– Dark Romanticist
• American writer
known for Gothic
fiction; tales of
mystery and the
macabre
• Inventor of the
detective fiction
genre
 THE TELL-TALE HEART

Open your books and listen to the dramatic reading of the story.
AMERICAN GOTHIC
ELEMENTS: THE TELL-TALE HEART

• Setting: old man’s house, night time, for 8 days

• Characters: an old man, the murderer, policemen
• POV: 1st person
• Conflict: the narrator is extremely disturbed, to the
point of paranoia, by the old man’s pale blue eyes
• What is paranoia? – Psychiatry. A mental disorder
characterized by systematized delusion and the
projection of personal conflicts, which are ascribed
to the supposed hostility of others, sometimes
progressing to disturbances of consciousness and
aggressive acts believed to be performed in self-
defense or as a mission
• Topics: Paranoia, Madness, Crime
•
 WRITING ASSIGNMENT

• What do you think is the worst punishment that a

criminal endures after committing a crime? Is it the
death penalty? lifetime imprisonment? public
shaming?
• In the context of the story, what was the murderer’s
punishment?
 SWADDLING CLOTHES

• by Yukio Mishima, published in 1955

• translated by Ivan Morris in 1960
• Original title: “Shinbun-gami” (newspapers)
• Mishima first belonged to the Roman-ha group or
Japanese Romanticists
• He later became an overtly political writer
• Criticized the degradation of moral values in Japan
brought about by the western modernization
• Setting: In Toshiko’s house, after World War II,
modern times in Japan
• Characters: Toshiko, her husband, nurse, doctor,
unnamed young man
• POV: omniscient (all-knowing) narrator
• Conflict: both internal and external
• Internal: Toshiko’s struggles – having an actor-husband,
witnessing the frail body of the newborn baby wrapped in
blood-stained newspapers on the floor, worrying about the
future of her son and the newborn baby
 • External: when she was seized by the young man on the
bench
• Topics: tradition and modernization, sensitivity and
callousness, morality and amorality, wealth and
poverty
 WRITING ASSIGNMENT:
SWADDLING CLOTHES
• What do you think happened to Toshiko at the end
of the story? Provide an ending to the story. Include
a few lines of dialogue between Toshiko and the
unnamed young man.
 MOTHERHOOD

• By Taslima Nasrin – feminist writer from Bangladesh;

her 1993 novel entitled Najja (Shame) contained
scenes in which Muslim men rape Hindu women;
Bangladeshi government banned her novel; soldiers
of Islam demanded her execution
• Translated by Tapati Gupta
• Exiled in 1994; lived in many countries
• Setting: Pakistan, or any other Near East Muslim
country, a Muslim household, modern time
• Characters: the daughter-in-law, Latif, the mother-
in-law, the daughter-in-law’s father, Pir Baba
• Conflict:
• external – man vs. man; man vs. society; man vs. nature
• Internal – the daughter-in-law struggles with her barrenness
and the social stigma attached to it
• Point of View: 1st person
• Topics: Gender roles, Feminism, Beliefs and
Traditions, Alienation
WRITING ASSIGNMENT: MOTHERHOOD

• Answer the following question in not less than 5

sentences on Notebook #2:
• If you were the daughter-in-law, what would you do
after the incident at Pir Baba’s place? What is the
greatest lesson that you have learned from this
story?
• If you were the husband, what would you do if your
wife tells you the truth about the Pir? What is the
greatest lesson that you have learned from this
story?
 MONSOON COUNTRY

• Characters: Tadpole, Boonliang Surin, Kum Surin,

Piang, Liang, village headman
• Setting: rural area, Thailand
• Conflict: Tadpole’s slow physical development, later
suspected to be muteness
• POV: 3rd person omniscient
• Topic: Local customs and beliefs, coping with
physical disability
 LOOT

• By Nadine Gordimer – South African writer and

political activist; Nobel Prize in Literature winner,
1991
• Setting: “Once upon our time…”; the time of a
great event
• Characters: many unnamed characters (looters);
an unnamed man
• Conflict: the man wanted a certain object (a
mirror?)
• POV: omniscient (all-knowing) narrator
• Interpret this line: “People rushed to take; take,
take.”
• What themes can you make from this line: “The
saliva of the sea glistened upon these objects; it is
given that time does not, never did, exist down
there where the materiality of the past and the
present as they lie has no chronological order, all is
one, all is nothing – or all is possessible at once.”