Joyce's techniques of the nonnarrated include not naming characters, eliding words, omitting pronoun antecedents, suppressing characters' thoughts, and not narrating action that must have happened. His techniques of the disnarrated are evident in such cases where words or actions could have occurred but do not, where states could have existed ut do not, and where objects could have been produced but are not. These forms of objectivity link Joyce's narrative theory with those of the earlier Flaubert, the contemporaneous Conrad, and the later Borges. Such techniques facilitate the short story's need for brevity but also permit its creating an illusion of expansion through the nonnarrated and disnarrated's suggestiveness. Allan H. Pasco.
Past puts some of the issues into sharp relief.
If economy depends upon the goals of the work, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is extraordinarily economical in the midst of extraordinary redundancy, for its goal is to stimulate involuntary memory in the reader. While novelists are obliged to depend on differing varieties of repetition to remind readers of what they may have forgotten but must know, the short story author has to assume that readers will remember everything in the story. The brief form of the short story consequently imposes a different economy, one that generally suns amplification and redundancy for generalization, elision, implication, arrangement, and stress. Return to the Archives Page. This site was designed and is maintained by G. Christopher Williams .