Reading Habits!

When I read an excerpt from a novel, it is very fun to try and pick up on the very subtle clues the author puts in the story. The development of the characters happens over a longer period of time so I feel that when a major shift in there life happens we can feel extra happy or in some cases very bad for them. In other words, it is almost as if we can empathize with the characters whenever they are developed over a long period of time.

Short stories take symbolism and use it to its fullest I think. By the time we are done reading a short story we spend more time trying to figure out what it meant than we do for a novel or a part of novel. There are more questions that come about in short stories, fundamental, basic questions like "has the narrator been dead this whole time?" or "who were Desiree's parents/ why was she purposely left behind?"

I think good short stories usually make us ask ourselves more questions than provide answers. It also seems to me, a novel provides a few answers to various problems in life, showing how particular characters overcome or at least deal with them. For example in both The Lamplighterand The Wide Wide World the authors both spent a great deal of time developing the father and mother figures to the readers, respectively. In particular we can see that the bible scene in The Wide Wide World takes roughly six pages. Keeping this in mind if we compare it to Desiree's Baby with a total length of five pages, and the types of questions we had to ask ourselves when we were done reading both, we can really understand the different ways each make us think.