The Short Story as a Form: Structure, Point of View and the Twist in "The Necklace"

Hook: the friend who borrowed your jacket

You lend a friend your old jacket. They lose it. Too embarrassed to tell you, they secretly buy you a brand-new, very expensive one, then spend months working extra shifts to pay for it. Finally they confess. You stare and say: But that jacket was from a thrift store. It cost five dollars.

That, more or less, is Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace (1884), one of the most famous short stories ever written. Today we look at how a short story is built, and who tells it, because those choices are what make an ending like that hit so hard.

What makes a short story a short story?

The short story is a form, and like the sonnet, it has characteristic features that affect how it means:

• Compression: few characters, one main conflict, limited time and place. Every detail must earn its place.
• A single main effect: the whole story usually builds toward one strong impression or realization.
• Strong openings and endings: the reader must be oriented fast, and the ending often carries the meaning: a reversal, an epiphany (a character's sudden insight) or a twist.
• Significant detail: because there is no room for everything, small details (a window, a necklace) often work as symbols.

The form has also changed over time. Nineteenth-century stories like Maupassant's often have a tight, linear plot and a surprise ending. Many twentieth-century stories are open-ended or non-linear: Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove (1922) gives seven different testimonies about a death in a bamboo grove and never tells you which one is true. That story inspired Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rashomon (1950).

Point of view: who tells the story?

• First person: the narrator says I. We know only what the narrator knows and chooses to tell. The narrator might be the main character or an observer, and might be unreliable (like the narrator of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, which you met in Grade 9).
• Third person limited: the narrator says she or he but stays close to one character's mind. The Story of an Hour mostly stays with Louise.
• Third person omniscient: an all-knowing narrator who can go into any mind and comment on characters. Maupassant often uses this.
• Objective (dramatic): the narrator reports only what could be seen and heard, like a camera, and never enters anyone's thoughts.

Two Grade 11 refinements:

• Free indirect discourse: third-person narration that slides into a character's own voice. When Chopin writes There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself, we hear Louise's thoughts in the narrator's sentence.
• Narrative distance: a narrator can stand close (we feel with the character) or far (we observe, maybe judge).

The Necklace: what happens

La Parure (The Necklace) by Guy de Maupassant (French, 1850 to 1893) was published in 1884 and is in the public domain. Read a translation online; it takes about 20 minutes.

• Mathilde Loisel is pretty and charming but born into a family of clerks, and she is married to a minor clerk at a government ministry in Paris. She suffers constantly, dreaming of wealth, elegance and luxury she does not have.
• Her husband proudly brings home an invitation to a ball at the ministry. She weeps: she has nothing to wear. He gives her the money he had saved to buy a hunting gun, and she buys a dress. Then she frets that she has no jewels, so she borrows a diamond necklace from a wealthy old school friend, Madame Forestier.
• At the ball she is a triumph: admired, happy, the prettiest woman there. At home afterward, she discovers the necklace is gone.
• They search everywhere, then secretly buy a nearly identical diamond necklace for 36 000 francs, borrowing at ruinous rates, and return it to Madame Forestier without a word.
• For ten years they live in poverty, working to repay the debt. Mathilde does the heavy housework herself and grows old and rough-handed.
• When the debt is paid, Mathilde meets Madame Forestier, still young and beautiful, on the Champs-Élysées, and finally tells her the truth. Madame Forestier, deeply moved, takes her hands and says the last line of the story (in Maupassant's French): Oh ! ma pauvre Mathilde ! Mais la mienne était fausse. Elle valait au plus cinq cents francs !... That is: Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was fake. It was worth five hundred francs at most!