As soon as we meet him, on the story’s first page, Otto complains about an impending Thanksgiving dinner he’s agreed to attend. The particular nature and tone of Otto’s nitpicking establish aspects of his character. Otto is an attorney specializing in intellectual property rights. In “Some Other, Better Otto” Deborah Eisenberg uses asides, initially, for comic effect. While a story’s narrator is most often the source of asides-as in Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Jorge Luis Borges, and David Foster Wallace-they can also be a function of character. As we’ll see, their function can be tonal and rhythmic, they can amplify one or more aspects of the narrative voice, they can characterize, and they can even serve to underscore a story’s central movement. Asides tend to take on a strategic function if and when they accumulate. While a digression might lead the reader to wonder when or even if we’ll return to the apparent path of our narrative journey, an aside is more of a pause, or momentary diversion. Humor and suspense depend on indirection, on the calibration of expectation and surprise, and they aren’t the only effects best achieved by taking an unexpected path.Īsides are essentially shorter digressions-as short as a word or a phrase, as long as a paragraph. Chaucer’s pilgrims get sidetracked in all sorts of ways, but Chaucer knows where he wants to take us, what he wants to show us not only in the individual tales, but in what they reveal about their tellers, and in how other characters respond. The Canterbury Tales, like Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Old Ram,” is an example of curated digression. The traveler’s tales are varied and, at least potentially, unpredictable, with no obligation to build on or respond to one another. But Chaucer makes the incidental the substance.Īt the same time, because the narrative spine is the progression of the journey, he can do whatever he wants with the ribs. If these were properly devout pilgrims, their conversation along the way should be incidental. To pass the time, they agree to a storytelling contest. One could argue that The Canterbury Tales consists almost entirely of digressions, if one sees the main path as the journey of Chaucer’s characters from London to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at the Canterbury Cathedral. Humor and suspense depend on indirection, on the calibration of expectation and surprise, and they aren’t the only effects best achieved by taking an unexpected path.ĭigression is defined as a turning away or wandering from the main path of a journey. Clarity and directness appeal to our rational selves.īut fiction has an emotional component, one that often requires sidestepping the rational, disguising “the point” or the path to it. But the most engaging and compelling short stories and novels are not necessarily the shortest or most direct. William Trevor famously described the short story as “the art of the glimpse,” and compression is generally a virtue. The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter- sign up here.
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