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6 Openings, Endings, and the Disjunctive Bump I think that when one has finished writing a short story one should delete the beginning and the end. That’s where we fiction writers mostly go wrong. —Anton Chekhov, quoted in Ivan Bunin, Memories and Portraits The arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more than a trick. It should mean that the narrator has so brooded on this subject that it has become his indeed, so made over and synthesized within him that, as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face or landscape in half-a-dozen strokes, the narrator can “situate” his tale in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail eliminated. —Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction But you have to know where to stop. That is what makes a short story. Makes it short at least. —Hemingway, “The Art of the Short Story” In the short story, beginnings are read in anticipation of the end, and the end is read with the beginning still fresh in mind. The reader brings a greater alertness to a story than to a novel, in which one settles in for the long haul and, once done, reflects on the narrative, looking back to a beginning read many hours or days before. Beginnings and endings of stories take up proportionally greater space and are therefore more prominent. A story is a sprint, with no time to recover from a fall. The writer must know how to begin and, as Hemingway suggests, also know when to shut up. Titles are our initial contact with stories but we rarely understand what they mean at first. When we have finished reading, however, and when we refer to the story afterward, they increasingly function in our sense-­ making process. Sometimes Hemingway’s titles signify a character or characters and are mostly denotative (“My Old Man,” “The Battler,” “The Killers”). But even such seemingly neutral titles have their effect. Compare these with, say, “The Jockey,” “Campfire Incident,” and “The Big Swede.” Other titles go deeper by choosing a symbolic object (“Cat in the Rain,” “A Canary for One,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”) or a resonant loca136 Openings, Endings, and the Disjunctive Bump   137 tion (“Indian Camp,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro ”). Sometimes the titles are ironic. “An Alpine Idyll” encloses an embedded gothic narrative, “Up in Michigan” and “The Sea Change” can be read as sexual double-entendres, and “A Simple Enquiry” is anything but simple. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is ironic if it refers to Macomber’s whole life, but perhaps not if it refers to his final moments in which, from one perspective, he finally “lives.” Hemingway’s best titles are sometimes literary allusions that enrich the story. “In Another Country” references a passage from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta that T. S. Eliot used as the epigraph to “Portrait of a Lady”—“Thou hast committed— / Fornication: but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead” (Poems 8)—leading to critical debates about how this relates to the death of the Italian major’s wife, Nick’s feelings about marriage (here and in other texts), and Hemingway’s break-ups with Agnes von Kurowsky and his wife Hadley. “Now I Lay Me” comes from an eighteenth-century child’s prayer and is directly relevant to the narrator ’s fear that his soul will leave his body if he falls asleep at night (“Now I lay me down to sleep, / I pray the Lord my soul to keep; / And if I die before I wake, / I pray the Lord my soul to take”). “Ten Indians” alludes to a nursery rhyme adapted from an 1860s minstrel show song. On the literal level, it can refer to the nine drunken Indians of the opening paragraph plus Prudence, the Indian girlfriend who breaks Nick’s heart. The nursery rhyme has two verses, one counting up from one to ten little Indian boys, the other counting back down to one, which corresponds to how Nick’s misery over his loss of Prudie builds up in the story and then is virtually gone by morning. The longer minstrel show versions begin with ten Indians and count down, but there are two different endings: “One little Injun livin’ all alone, / He got married and then there were none” and “One little Indian boy left all alone; / He went out and hanged himself...

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