Random
First Sentences or Paragraphs #4: Norton Anthology of Short Fiction A-G Edition
[series note: This post is the fourth of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph — I’ll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn’t exist in the contextless manner in which I’ve presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we’ve been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller’s Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
“The slaughter hasn’t started yet.”
– Lee K. Abbott, “One of Star Wars, One of Doom”
“That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name.”
– Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love”
“What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America was the smell.”
– Charles Baxter, “The Disappeared”
“Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons.”
– Gina Berriault, “Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?”
“A man stood upon a railroad bridge in Northern Alabama, looking down into swift waters twenty feet below.”
– Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge”
“The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote“
“This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.”
– Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”
“I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy, blue-lined notebook paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village.”
– Willa Cather, “A Wagner Matinee”
“I seem sixty and married, but these efforts are due to my condition and sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one.”
– Mark Twain, “The Invalid’s Story”
“None of them knew the color of the sky.”
– Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
“The Governor’s wife thought the Governor was looking especially well this evening.”
– Susan Dodd, “Public Appearances”
“We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in the darkness.”
– Stuart Dybek, “We Didn’t”
“He was an orphan, and, to himself, he seemed like one, looked like one.”
– Stanley Elkin, “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe”
“The woman in front of him was eating roasted peanuts that smelled so good that he could barely contain his hunger.”
– Ralph Ellison, “King of the Bingo Game”
“We started dying before the snow, and, like the snow, we continued to fall.”
– Louise Erdrich, “Matchimanito”
“When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at least ten years.”
– William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
“This is not a happy story. I warn you.”
– Richard Ford, “Great Falls”
“The first children who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an empty ship.”
– Gabriel García Márquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”
“When the time came at last and they removed the wealth of bandages from his head and face, all with the greatest of care as if they were unwinding a precious mummy, the Doctor–he of the waxed, theatrical, upswept mustache and the wet sad eyes of a beagle hound–turned away.”
– George Garrett, “Wounded Soldier”
“The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught up in a crowd.”
– Nadine Gordimer, “A Soldier’s Embrace”
Tags: first sentences, norton anthology of short fiction
Lee K Abbot – comedy too broad
Toni Cade Bambara – such a cliche
Charles Baxter – possibly untrue
Gino Berriault – cartoonish, unsmooth
Ambrose Bierce – effective
Jorge Luis Borges – singular, touch of genius maybe
Raymond Carver – interesting, if mannered
Willa Cather – somewhat dead
Mark Twain – funny but not genuinely so
Stephen Crane – possibly touch of genius
Susan Dodd – mannered
Stuart Dybek – willfully perverse
Stanley Elkin – stylized, but i don’t mind
Ralph Ellison – not so fluent: that second “that”; maybe banal
Louise Erdrich – much too literary
William Faulkner – expect not to be able to breathe
Richard Ford – pleased with itself, very; probably knocking around in author’s head for ages
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez – possibly too delicate
George Garrett – entertaining
Nadine Gordimer – cold
I’m pretty sure there’s a missing letter in the Faulkner sentence, and I don’t think that’s how one writes Garcia Marquez’s name, even without the accent marks.
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Degrus’s response raises one of the big First Sentence questions: how much foreshadowing/portent is too much to discover in / impose on a first sentence?
In retrospect – that is, after having read the whole thing – , the first page-and-a-half of Gatsby (indeed, its title) are remarkably ‘full’ of the whole story — one could say ‘pregnant’, were one to let “pregnancy” admit metaphorically of degree. But how much is this sense of a ‘table being set’ is back-projected by the rest of the novel (in the mind of a reader of the whole thing)?
I’m pretty sure there’s a missing letter in the Faulkner sentence, and I don’t think that’s how one writes Garcia Marquez’s name, even without the accent marks.
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Degrus’s response raises one of the big First Sentence questions: how much foreshadowing/portent is too much to discover in / impose on a first sentence?
In retrospect – that is, after having read the whole thing – , the first page-and-a-half of Gatsby (indeed, its title) are remarkably ‘full’ of the whole story — one could say ‘pregnant’, were one to let “pregnancy” admit metaphorically of degree. But how much is this sense of a ‘table being set’ is back-projected by the rest of the novel (in the mind of a reader of the whole thing)?
Typos fixed. Thanks for the catch, deadgod.
Deadgod – I’m six days out of seven more a second than a first sentence kind of customer. First sentences that sound like first sentences – of the above, Abbott, Bambara and Ford sound the most first – aren’t fooling me in a way I’m prepared to be fooled. Cut the sentence that’s too first and maybe you have something, maybe you don’t.
That’s fair, and something (I think) like what I meant: the first sentence is Important, but the rest of the sentences illuminate it, too – the whole of a story-in-sentences is a unity and coherence of its individual sentences and their relations to each other. A too-glamorous or -violent or -whatever first sentence is, maybe-to-probably, a distraction from, as opposed to a easing or propulsion into, The Story.
But your thumbnail characterizations of some of the first sentences of the anthology don’t seem, to me, really to be about those sentences:
“The slaughter hasn’t started yet.” – comedy too broad: From just that sentence? There isn’t any “comedy” in that sentence on its own; its story could go in any direction.
“The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated.” – singular, touch of genius maybe: This sentence isn’t “singular” – it could be the first sentence of a thousand Sixth-Form/high-school or university compositions, or, indeed, an MLA paper. The italicized “visible” is interesting, maybe, but there isn’t enough sentence there for a genius-“maybe” call, based only on this sentence.
“I seem sixty and married, but these efforts are due to my condition and sufferings, for I am a bachelor and only forty-one.” – funny but not genuinely so: By itself, it’s not a “funny” sentence, “genuinely” or falsely; it could easily be the first sentence of an elegaic Cheever story.
“When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral, the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.” – expect not to be able to breathe: Separating the “men” and “women” of the town in these terms is often fuel for comedy – so often as to verge on cliche – , but this long sentence, by itself, is not suffocatingly dense or intricate.
These four phrases are surely reasonable, albeit too short to be anything but preliminary, sketches of the respective authors who inspired them. But they’re equally surely not reflective of reasonable reactions to only the sentences they’re attached to.
Of course, one could cry, tendentiously, ‘subjective! subjective!’. Ok: where’s the broad comedy in that one sentence of Abbott’s? where’s the singularity and genius in Borges’s one sentence? where’s the non-genuine funniness of Twain’s one sentence? where’s the unbreatheability of Faulkner’s one sentence?
Deadgod – My rubric: nothing tells you you’ve seen it all before like a first sentence.
That is: nothing tells me that I’ve seen it all before, when I’m surveying the Just Reviewed table in a branch of one of the poignantly decaying chain bookstores we have in my country or Clicking to Look Inside on the ‘zon , full-on sceptically, like I was always taught to do, like a first sentence.
I’m hard on first sentences. First sentences make me hard on them. Which sounds rude, but maybe that’s what I am: let’s say I rarely feel very genteel when I crack open something behind which squats those three rats author, agent, publisher.
“The slaughter hasn’t started yet. ” Call me instinctive but this sounds like a joke. Like the man isn’t talking about real slaughter. (Though I’m worried the story’s title dropped hints that messed with my instincts here.) It’s just one big funny. Too big (hence “broad”). Slaughter is big funny word. Yet, here, is a big funny word. Slaughter is even bigger-funnier when you put The in front of it. Who says “The slaughter hasn’t started yet” except someone who’s seen what’s coming – and what’s coming is a punchline. We’re in a place where slaughter happens (better, the slaughter), has to happen, can’t do anything about it; and a place where awful inevitable things happen is a funny place (because nothing’s funnier than what’s predictable; no one’s funnier than someone who’s seen it all before) and this kind of place is especially funny when you put The in front of those awful inevitable things. Especially when those awful inevitable things aren’t real awful.
“The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated.” If only I hadn’t known from which genius this came. It doesn’t belong in a story. That’s the clever thing about it. Yes, the visible ups the cleverness mightily. If a high school student wrote this in some smart but corpse-like essay, I agree I wouldn’t go weak at the knees. If that high school student saw the light about the education system that, as smart as he is, made a corpse of him, and having seen the light transferred the opening line from essay to work of imagination, I’d feel threatened by how young he is, but that’d only be a compliment, surely.
The Twain – isn’t the joke something about how marriage makes you look older? I like it though. I like Twain, in small doses, although maybe I should ignore that this is Twain. I’d read on. I just wouldn’t expect to be amused colossally.
The Faulkner – there’s a ripple of comedy here, I agree. Let’s be clear on this: the death of a spinster is something to laugh at. And, I mean, she’s not just a spinster, she’s a monument; and even more hilarious, a fallen monument (like that one of Saddam a few long years back. They set about it with their inexpensive footware). But even in comedy there may be no breathing space. We have a town, we have all the people of that town, we have a sad life, completed, we have a weird house; we have all these big matters that the author’s gonna need to take us through, now that he’s started in the way he has. It’ll all be done super, if you’re in the mood, but the size of the task ahead, you know?
Still think you’re (still) talking about stories/writers/reputations that you know (without needing to have read some particular story), rather than talking about the story you haven’t yet read as begun by the first sentence that you have read.
Not that it’s Bad to recognize “Borges”, say, as a category, a brand – I think this anticipation is an unavoidable consequence of reading even a little Borges and being even a little aware of “Borges” – .
But this anticipatory having-become-acquainted is not the same experience as the first sentence of a story in-forming one of the story-to-come, bleeding structure and sense forward.