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The Paradox of the Short-Story Composite : An exploration of reading temporality in Olive Kitteridge and A Visit From The Goon Squad

This thesis explores a neglected literary form known by a variety of terms, including the short-story composite, the short-story cycle, and the novel of interlinked stories. Through an analysis of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, I examine the reading process that results from its structure, with its tension between the whole of the composite and its individual chapters. The short-story composite is comprised of chapters that exist both as individual, self-sufficient stories and as parts that develop each other to create the larger composite. This paradoxical nature of the short-story composite’s chapters provides a reading experience different from that of the novel and the short story, which the short-story composite seems to combine. As a result of its constantly changing settings and focalizing characters and its lack of chronology, the short-story composite contains more “frames,” or storylines, than the average novel, yet is still more interconnected than the short story collection. Chapter One will show how the short-story composite’s structure creates a tension between the whole and the parts, as I argue that Egan and Strout exploit this tension to bolster theme through the act of reading itself. Chapter Two will demonstrate how the reader makes sense of and connects the parts to the whole through a dual-temporality, that of reading forward through the chapter and gaining a sense of closure while simultaneously looking back and synthesizing certain dimensions of the frame parts into whole frames—the latter which is a more “open” process. Although it is arguable that this process is also involved when reading other literary forms, I suggest that the existence of the dual-temporality is exacerbated by the structure of the short-story composite, and that it is required equally throughout the entire work, whereas in most stories and novels, retrospection is intensified at the end (Lunden 65). In the conclusion, I will discuss the social and cultural implications of the reading process, positing that the process of reading the short-story composite trains the reader for the mode of thinking employed in daily life, but without the real-life consequences. I will also speculate that the short-story composite is more conducive to the reading habits of contemporary society—which devotes less time to reading and reads in shorter periods, such as while on a subway—as the short-term reading of the chapter requires less time but still creates a satisfying sense of closure for the reader. The short-story composite thus addresses both the decreased amount of time for reading literature and society’s preference for the long-term reading process of the novel, meanwhile providing the real-life benefit of training us for how to think in daily life.