If the novel creates the illusion of reality by presenting a literal authenticity to the material facts of the external world, as Ian Watt suggests, the short story attempts to be authentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal reality. If the novel's quest for extensional reality takes place in the social world and the material of its analyses are manners as the indication of one's soul, as Lionel Trilling says, the field of research for the short story is the primitive, antisocial world of the unconscious, and the material of its analysis are not manners, but dreams. The results of this distinction are that whereas the novel is primarily a social and public form, the short story is mythic and spiritual. While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophical framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point.
Outward acts have often an inside magnitude.
The short story , with its shorter span than the novel's, with its freedom from forced complexity, its possible lucidness, is able, like the poetic drama, to measure man by his aspirations and dreams and place him alone on that stage which, inwardly, every man is conscious of occupying alone. Hence the 'difficulty' of much postmodernist writing. The characteristic fragmentation of postmodernist discourse is the direct result of a confrontation with language as itself problematic. The primary question is that of the ability of language to express.