the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

Slow and easy does it, right? :)

I know this isn't the standard "30 day challenge" format, but I cannot write happy/uplifting stuff every day that I, even with my low standards, am willing to post. Thus, I'm just going to do it as I can. 

I was reading short stories a couple of days ago when I realized that I could not think of a happy one. 

This realization came about after I'd summoned the energy to read some short stories in the first place. When you think about it, this itself is strange, considering that I can pick up a novel or any real BOOK and open it without having to psyche myself. I cannot do this with short stories. I must steel myself. 

Anyway...in the first one I read, an eight-year-old boy is hit by a car on his birthday then dies in the hospital three days later. His parents are understandably wrecked, but end up connecting in a small way with a baker who has been a jerk throughout the story. This is a Raymond Carver story, and it has his trademark: lost, empty people who connect in minor ways giving the reader a tiny sense of hope by the end of the story. 

In the next story I read, a woman returned from college to dog-sit for the $250k clone of the dog she dogsat in high school. In the end, she accepts that this is her role for the next four years, working for the crazy millionaires, as she watches the puppy eat his own shit. The beauty of the metaphor aside, I don't see much of anything that's redeeming about this story. It's just...depressing. 

Then I got to wondering if I could think of any short story that isn't depressing. And I couldn't. Not really. I asked some colleagues and we came up with "Cathedral," possibly my favorite short story if I had to choose, which is another Raymond Carver piece but still not particularly cheerful. Also, Kate Chopin's "The Storm." 

Otherwise? Think about it. 

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"? A man turns into a giant cockroach and everything goes downhill from there. 

Crane's "The Open Boat"? Where everybody who deserves to live dies. 

And--heavens!--Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"? A woman takes ill in her husband's ancestral mansion and slowly loses her mind? Wonderful. 

Jack London's "To Build a Fire." A man freezes to death. 

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"? Ye gods. 

James Baldwin's anything? 

Ha Jin's "Saboteur": A man is imprisoned until he confesses to crimes he did not commit in order to avoid dying from hepatitis. Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is about a town where everyone is happy all the time because an innocent child is being tortured to pay for their happiness. Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," about a weird guy who just doesn't go away and is possibly already dead. Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find": a sociopath murders a family. Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" itself isn't particularly happy, either. "The Monkey's Paw." "A Rose for Emily." 

And all this time, you thought Edgar Allan Poe was special. Not really. Almost every classic canonized short story is hopelessly depressing. 

I'm not after sunshine and roses and "happy endings," but geeeesh. Why is it that the standard read-in-college short stories cannot find it in their hearts to leave us with a sense of hope, at least? I don't expect the plot and character development, the climax, and the denouement of your average novel. I know short stories are limited, but I still don't understand why they seem so bent on what I'd say is well beyond "stark realism." A work can be realistic without making you want to slice your wrists. 

Is the goal of this art form is to emphasize how fair life isn't? Because I've already got that. And I understand that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Surely we can move on to using stories to communicate other, less dark, ideas. 

Maybe this is why short stories are so rarely read or sought out or published anymore. Who needs art to make you feel like shit if life already has that taken care of? 

d