D.C.O. Cargunka - Nature of The Stories

Nature of The Stories

The two D.C.O. Cargunka stories, written late in Hodgson's brief writing career, represent some of his best and most sophisticated work. They are lively, fast-paced, and filled with dialogue (written in dialect), and make effective use of significant detail. Unlike the Captain Jat stories, which are quite dark, the D.C.O. Cargunka stories are gently humorous. While Captain Gault often makes others the butt of his jokes, he himself doesn't display very many of the character flaws that help to humanize a fictional character. By contrast, Cargunka is himself the butt of several running gags about his obsessions with his personal appearance, poetry, and potatoes. It can't be known, of course, whether Hodgson might one day have written more stories featuring Cargunka. But by taking the most interesting aspects of his earlier recurring character stories and improving on them, while discarding aspects that didn't work well, Hodgson created a character that both succeeded in the two completed stories and had great potential for future work.

Read more about this topic:  D.C.O. Cargunka

Famous quotes containing the words nature of, nature and/or stories:

    Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information—never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good—he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
    Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)

    So Nature deals with us, and takes away
    Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
    Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
    Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
    Being too full of sleep to understand
    How far the unknown transcends the what we
    know.
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)

    All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.... For me “style” is matter.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)