The short fiction readings are grouped according to narrative style with ancillary poetry readings chosen for either their narrative style or thematic relation to the stories. For each story or poem you read, please consider the following broad questions as a framework for your close reading. The individual guide questions provided for each story or poem will direct you to examine its more specific aspects.

• Why has the author chosen a particular narrative point of view?
  
• Why does the point of view suit the subject of the work?
  
• How can the reader differentiate between the narrator’s purpose and the author’s purpose?
  
• What role does irony play in each work?
  
• What literary elements and devices does the author use and to what effect?

In this final section of our short story study, we will take a look at the idea of Subjective Reality, a concept that has more to do with viewpoint than point of view. The two selections, "Yellville" by Judy Budnitz and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez depict versions of reality that deviate drastically from what most would consider the "norm."

Although all fiction communicates truths by means of imagined facts, most often the writer attempts to create the illusion of reality in a story by remaining within the realm of the plausible. There are other kinds of fiction, however, that transcend the parameters of accepted reality and venture into fantasy. This kind of fiction asks the reader for what poet Samuel Coleridge Taylor called "a wiling suspension of disbelief" in order to experience the reality the author has created. Fantasy can be used for its own sake or as a way to communicate important insights into human beings and their nature. Despite the fact that many believe all reality is subjective by the very nature of human perception, the conscious use of fantasy, surrealism and magical realism as literary techniques allows the reader to observe and consider how and why people create their realities as they do. Both "Yellville" and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" employ elements of fantasy, surrealism and magical realism within their own unique contexts to examine the vagaries of human nature and the power of human reason.

Judy Budnitz’s fiction examines ordinary life situations through a distinctly extraordinary lens. She combines outrageous fantasy and dark humor to create a version of life that, according to Eleanor J. Bader in the Library Review, “twists the expected like a fun house mirror.” In “Yellville,” Budnitz creates a conflict between Russell, a teenager from rural Arkansas and the middle class parents whose daughter he’s dating.

Discussion Questions

1. Consider the character of Russell, keeping in mind both direct and indirect characterization. How would Russell be portrayed in a more realistically written story? What kind of character would he represent?
   
   
2. Although “Yellville” is comical in a grotesque way, are there also elements of tragedy here? Explain. If Budnitz is making a social commentary, on which characters is she focusing?
   
   
3. Eleanor Bader describes Budnitz’s fiction as “both humorous and politically pointed.” What kinds of issues does Russell address in his “tall tales"? In what way can these tales be described as satire?
   
   
4. How far does the author intend that the reader adopt “a willing suspension of disbelief?” Is the reader supposed to believe that Russell is telling the truth, or that he’s simply playing a joke on Charlene’s parents? How would each version affect the message of the story?
   
   
5. What is the tone of this story? How does the author develop the tone?
   
   
6. Read the excerpt from A Glossary of Literary Terms below. Would you consider Judy Budnitz’s short story, “Yellville” an example of fabulation? Why or why not?

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" is an example of magical realism in fiction writing. The term magical realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales. Robert Scholes has popularized metafiction as an overall term for the large and growing class of novels which depart drastically from the traditional categories either of realism or romance, and also the term fabulation for the current mode of free-wheeling narrative invention. These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic -- and sometimes highly effective -- experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.
– M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1993) as cited by Dr. Robert P. Fletcher of West Chester University.

Discussion Questions

1. Why did the author choose not to name the town, the time and the angel? Why is this story called “a tale for children?” To what extent do the various characters in the story exhibit childlike points of view?
   
   
2. Where do Pelayo and Elisenda think the winged man is from? Are they considerate of him, or do they exploit him? What does this indicate about them? How do the various townspeople explain the winged man? How do they treat him? Is there any change in their attitude towards him from the beginning to the end of the story? Again, what does this indicate about these characters?
   
   
3. The neighbor woman considers angels to be “fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy.” What does this statement mean? How does this help explain her attitude toward the winged man?
   
   
4. What connection – if any – is there between the winged man and the child of Pelayo and Elisenda?
   
   
5. Note the use of imagery to create mood and reinforce the plot and themes of the story. For example, how does the description of the atmosphere at the beginning of the story differ from the description at the end? What ideas does this change convey and/or reinforce?
   
   
6. Note the author’s use of juxtaposition, placing humorous and tragic details together and supernatural naturalistic details together. What purpose does this serve? What effect does this technique have?
   
   
7. What is Garcia Marquez implying about reality and the miraculous in “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings"? What is he implying about human beings and their power of reason?