TU || Important Notes for B.A. 2nd year (Essays and Short Stories)

The Essay as Story: History

(Narrative essay)

Narrative essay is written in the form of story. It tries to persuade the readers by using stories and storytellers. The essayist can use one or more than one stories in a single essay to give some ideas. The stories can be made by the essayist himself or he can borrow it from somewhere. He presents the story by the means of description, narration, dialogue and commentary, We should look at the commentary more attentively because he gives his views, ideas and concepts in his commentary. It carries the main point of the essay implied or directly stated. Therefore, commentary helps us understand the main point of the essay.

Yes, narrative essay and stories are almost similar because these essays tell the stories but we should make ourselves cleverer now. we can find the differences between them because narrative essays focus on some issues of the story but a pure story focuses only on the beauty of literature. The second difference between them is that the narrative essay has commentary but the story does not have. The essayist connects the idea of the story with his main point but he story writer does not connect. A story writer tells a beautiful story and gives us pleasure. Narrative essay focuses on a particular event, action, place or person. Sometimes, the essayist tells us clearly what issue he wants to raise by that particular event, action, place or person but occasionally they leave the ideas to be detected by the readers. In such cases, we feel difficult to grasp can the. But the cleaver readers. finds the depth of insight. The tactful reader can find what the essayist wants to suggest. Therefore, we should try to find out the suggested meaning of the stories in the essay. The implied (suggested) meaning is the deeper truth. If you got this deeper truth, you killed the bird, success!

Keep in mind that the essayist does not tell the story for pleasure but he tells it to support his main point. So, you should not limit yourself on what, where and when like a journalist. You should try to find out how and why like a historian. It is the best way to discover the main point when the essayist does not give it clearly.

The Hurled Astray by Nora Ephron is a good example of the narrative essay. In this essay, she has used two short stories in order to show her idea. Her main point is that the women's revolution changed the man- woman relationship. people in her time were all confused how to behave in the changed social condition after the women's revolution in 1960s. Ephron wants to expose this confused social situation in her essay. So she brings the two different short stories, the story of Garry Cooper and the story of Mr. Korda that are related to man- woman relationship. She supports her main idea by bringing these two short stories. In this way, narrative essay borrows one or more than one stories to give some important idea.