Short Story Cycle - Structure

Structure

Dunn and Morris list several methods that authors use to provide unity to the collection as a whole (the examples are theirs):

  • the cycle focuses on a geographical area: The Country of the Pointed Firs, Dubliners, The Women of Brewster Place, Like Water for Chocolate
  • the cycle focuses on a central protagonist: Cosmicomics, Winesburg, Ohio, The Woman Warrior, A Certain Lucas
  • the cycle features a collective protagonist: In Our Time, Go Down, Moses, Love Medicine, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
  • the cycle uses patterns to create coherence: Three Lives, Exile and the Kingdom, The Golden Apples, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
  • the cycle focuses on story-telling: The Way to Rainy Mountain, Pricksongs & Descants, Lost in the Funhouse, How to Make an American Quilt

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Famous quotes containing the word structure:

    “What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows—it must grow; nothing can prevent it.”
    —Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    “Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.”
    —Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)

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