Settings in American Short Fiction Quiz

Answer: Young Goodman Brown

Nathaniel Hawthorne published his story "Young Goodman Brown" anonymously in 1835 in "The New-England Magazine" and then later in 1846 in his book of short stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse". The story is an allegorical tale about a young married man living in a seventeenth-century New England Puritan community, and it is meant to expose the hypocrisy of that culture as well as that of contemporary self-righteous individuals. Goodman Brown is shocked to discover that the entire town has gathered to partake in some devilish ceremony; however, he never once observes the fact that he too has walked the very same path that they have all walked to get to their destination. At the end of the story, Hawthorne, in typical fashion, leaves the readers wondering whether the events of the story really happened or whether they were a dream. Nevertheless, Goodman Brown is a changed man. He lives the rest of his life in bitterness and despair because he believes no one is truly a righteous person. His journey into the woods not only represents an experimentation with sin but also an exploration of himself. He, unfortunately, does not see this journey to its end (he quits, so to speak, when he wakes in the morning somewhere in the forest) and fails to arrive at an understanding of grace and forgiveness. As a judge of everyone else's sinful flaws, he never finds any joy in his life, and "his dying hour was gloom".

Hawthorne wrote several works about the New England colonies during the time of Puritan influence. He was particularly interested, if not preoccupied, with the Puritan culture because of the shame he felt about his great-great-grandfather's who was a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. John Hathorne (Hawthorne added the "w" to his last name to separate himself from his ancestor) condemned innocent people to their deaths and remained the only judge who never recanted his belief that those executed were truly wtiches.

Answer: To Build a Fire

Jack London published "To Build a Fire" in 1908, and it remains one of the best examples of naturalist literature that became popular during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Naturalism attempted to depict what was considered a realistic picture of life--a world in which humans are too fragile to survive an indifferent universe filled with chance happenings. Typically, such literature depicted human beings in conflict with nature, a conflict human beings usually lost.

London derived inspiration for the story from his own experiences searching for gold one winter season in the Yukon territory. Furthermore, he had published a story in 1902 called "To Build a Fire". While the 1908 story, the more popular and more celebrated tale, shares some similarities with the earlier story, its plot is most certainly a different one.

Answer: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Ambrose Bierce wrote and published "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in 1890 in "The San Francisco Examiner" and then republished it in 1891 in his collection of stories entitled "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians". The story exists in three parts: the first is a narration of the preparation of Farquhar's hanging, the second is a flashback to Farquhar's being set up by a Union soldier who convinces Farquhar to burn the Owl Creek Bridge, and the third is the narration of Farquhar's escape, which is revealed to be a fantasy that occurs in Farquhar's mind as he hangs. While the technique of stream of consciousness was not really developed until the twentieth century, Bierce's allowing readers to enter Farquhar's mind as well as his unique view of reality is certainly an experiment that anticipates the modernist exploration of the subconscious. Kurt Vonnegut considered "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" to be the greatest American short story ever written.

Ambrose Bierce served in the Union Army during the Civil War and achieved the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he lived in San Francisco for a while where he became friends with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Bret Harte. In 1913, he went to Mexico and disappeared without a trace. No one knows what became of him or when he died, but some speculate that he was killed during the Mexican Revolution.

Answer: The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was first published in 1936 in "Esquire" magazine. It was later republished in 1938 in collection of his stories called "The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories" and then again in 1961 in another collection of his short fiction entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories". Harry and his wife Helen are on safari in the African plains, but because of his infected wound and gangrene he is unable to participate. While he waits for an airplane to arrive to airlift him to medical care, he wallows in self-pity and remembers various scenes from his past. He regrets that he has allowed his relationships with women to interfere with his career as a writer and worries that his current marriage to a rich widow has tainted his integrity. Harry's concern was a legitimate worry of Ernest Hemingway himself. In his 1935 work of non-fiction "The Green Hills of Africa", Hemingway wrote of how "politics, women, drink, money, and ambition" damage American writers. He was afraid of how his financial success and celebrity status, which also brought him into the spheres of other rich and famous individuals, were gradually eating away at his ability to establish himself as a serious writer of meaningful literature. The story also captures Hemingway's own struggle with finding meaning in a human's life when Christianity no longer offered a viable explanation of life.

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" ends with Harry being airlifted in the morning light over the Arican plains and to the top of Kilimanjaro, which he believes is his destination. Suddenly, the reader realizes this is only a dream as Helen notices that Harry is no longer breathing and hears the odd howl of a hyena in the night.

Kilimanjaro, located in Tanzania, is a dormant volcano and, reaching a height of 5,895 meters or 16,000 feet above sea level, is the tallest mountain on the continent of Africa.

Answer: The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" was first published in 1846 in the magazine "Godey's Lady's Book", just three years before his death. The story is one of Poe's experimental short stories that are told in first person from the perspective of a deranged character, in this case a sociopathic murderer. Montressor never gives any details of Fortunato's insult; he merely explains that no one insults him "with impunity". As they walk through the catacombs beneath Montressor's home, Montressor toys with Fortunato and seems to enjoy the anticipation of killing him. He laughs and then mocks Fortunato after chaining him to a wall. Fortunato begs for his life while Montressor builds a wall before him and leaves him to die an agonizing death by live burial. Ironically, Fortunato is dressed in a jester's or court fool's costume, and his name suggests good luck. To add further to the horror, Montressor is telling his tale fifty years later to someone like a priest ("You, who so very well know the nature of my soul, . . .") who appears to be hearing a confession, but Montressor has no remorse and seems to take pride in his accomplishment of killing a man and not ever being discovered for his heinous crime.

The story is lauded by critics and scholars today because of Poe's exploration of using a kind of narrator that is a precursor to twentieth-century writers' use of an unreliable narrator.

Answer: Looking for Mr. Green

Saul Bellow wrote and then published "Looking for Mr. Green" in "Commentary" in 1951 and then again in "Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories" in 1968. The story exposes the plight and horror of twnetieth-century urban America through Mr. Grebe's journey into the ugly parts of the city of Chicago. Indifffernce, cynicism, racism, violence, depravity, and poverty abound, illustrated through countless examples. Grebe's employer doesn't care if Grebe successfully delivers any checks because all that truly matters is that Grebe takes care of himself and collects a paycheck. No one that Grebe encounters will give him any information about Mr. Green because they don't trust a white man from the government. One of the apartments Grebe visits has no heat, electricity, properly functioning indoor plumbing; furthermore, the walls inside and out are covered with grafitti, and Grebe enters one barely furnished room to find ten or more people wearing every piece of clothing he or she owns and waiting to go to work at night after ten or more others come home from a day shift to sleep in the room they all share. The most horrific detail of this life is that when an inidividual is murdered and his or her corpse is later discovered by the police, no one attempts to identify the victim and simply makes up a name for the deceased.

At the end of a very long day of "looking for Mr. Green", Grebe ends up giving the relief check to someone other than Mr. Green. Although he attempts to justify his decision to commit what essentially amounts to a fraudulent act, he has given up on his priniciple that Mr. Green must be found to affirm that Mr. Green matters as an individual. The reader is left wondering whether Grebe's act is truly an act of charity because he has given money away to someone who symbolically "stands for Mr. Green" or whether the act represents how our society has devolved because we have given our consent to this deterioration after accepting that changing the way things are is just too difficult.

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, Saul Bellow also won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and three different National Book Awards for Fiction.

Answer: Desiree's Baby

Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby" was published in "Vogue" in 1893, but it is set during the antebellum South while slavery was still legal. Armand Aubigny is a slave owner, and his hatred toward the people he believes are inferiors that can be owned as if they were objects destroys the love he once felt for Desiree, his wife. Characteristic of many of Chopin's short stories, "Desiree's Baby" ends with an ironic twist when Armand discovers that he himself is the son of a slave woman and thus he is the one of African-American descent, not Desiree. The story ends with Armand's discovery, and readers are left to speculate what he will now do.

Besides its attack on the racist South, the story also illustrates the tragic situation of women in the South who were victims of a patriarchal society, particularly the women of Louisiana who lived under Napoleonic Law. Desiree's identity is so wrapped up in her role as a wife and nothing else, she is left with no option but suicide once Armand tells her to take the child and go away.

Answer: The Open Boat

Stephen Crane published "The Open Boat" in 1897 in "Scribner's Magazine". The story evolved from a report Crane had written about his own experience of spending thirty hours at sea in a small boat with three other men following the wreck of a ship he was on while returning from reporting on the Cuban insurrection against Spain.

The story is hailed as a primary example of naturalism. The world is presented as an uncaring place with no beneficent power concerned about the plight of mankind. At one point the correspondent in the story sees a tall tower on shore and grows frustrated that no one is looking out to sea or is even present; he then realizes that the tower is a perfect representation of nature's response to the suffering of insignificant mankind. He observes, "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree . . . the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent".

However, the story also seems to support the necessity of human beings' sympathy and compassion for one another among the harsh reality of life. At an earlier point in the story, much attention is drawn to the fellowship existing among the four men struggling to survive. In fact, the correspondent, who had heretofore been a cynical man, felt the "brotherhood" they were experiencing "was the best experience of his life".

Answer: A&P

A&P was the shortened name of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a chain of supermarkets in Canada and the United States; the supermarkets were all closed in 2015.

John Updike published the short story "A&P" in "The New Yorker" in 1961. It was meant to be a satirical commentary on what many had begun to refer to as "the tanquilized '50s". The grocery store is the perfect setting for a story that criticizes North American consumers whose purposeless lives have settled into a lifeless routine. Sammy is an older teenage clerk who works at his local A&P, and he narrates the story--obviously written from the first person narrative point of view. He remarks that the highlight of one old lady's life is that she is able to complain about how she was charged twice for one item and then observes how all the townsfolk behave as sheep who have developed a pattern of walking down certain grocery store aisles in only one direction and who live five miles away from the beach but have not seen the ocean in a number of years. Sammy also laments that his sole purpose in life seems to be to become a manager of the store and have a wife and family. Thus, when three out-of-town girls come into the supermarket while they are dressed only in their swimsuits, he is inspired by their behavior and attitudes "to go against the flow". After his boss reprimands the girls in front of everyone and they leave, Sammy quits his job and throws his apron on the counter. He then walks into the parking lot expecting to be lauded as a hero. Instead, he finds the girls have gone, and everything remains in and around the store as it always has. Whle the story advocates nonconformity and living life meaningfully, it at the same time suggests that choosing to live such a life will not be easy.

Answer: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Herman Melville published his story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" in "Putnam's Magazine" in 1853. The story focuses on the rapid growth of the American economy and of society's urbanization and the ensuing anxieties that occurred. Bartleby, the main character of the story, suffers from agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace, which was becoming more and more frequently diagnosed by doctors of Melville's time. In local newspapers were stories of individuals who became depressed and catatonic as Bartleby does in his story.

The lawyer eventually moves out of his rented office because Bartleby has moved into it to live and the lawyer does not have the nerve to forcefully remove him. However, the new renters of the office are in no mood to handle Bartleby and have him arrested. Bartleby is thrown into prison, where he ironically dies scrunched up against one of the surrounding walls of the prison.