At the End of the Road

Mr. Clayton Hamilton says in "A Manual of the Art of Fiction" (page 187), " -- although the novel may be either realistic or romantic in general method, the short-story is almost of necessity obliged to be romantic. In the brief space allotted to him, it is practically impossible for the writer of short-stories to induce a general truth from particular, imagined facts imitated from actuality: it is far simpler to deduce the imagined details of the story from a central thesis, held securely in the author's mind and suggested to the reader at the outset. It is a quicker process to think from the truth to facts than to think from facts to the truth. " And in illustration of his statement, he adds that Daudet and de Maupassant, who worked realistically in their novels, worked romantically in their _contes_, also that the great short-story writers of our own language have been, nearly all of them, romanticists -- from Poe to Kipling.

With this interesting tenet in mind, look over all the realistic stories in the four volumes we are studying, and try to apply to each the same methods by which the romantic stories are studied. Does the application break down? How far can you follow it? Try, for example, to analyze the plot of "At the End of the Road" according to the type used again and again in this book.