CHAPTER II A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF LITERATURE 2.1 Short

CHAPTER II
A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF LITERATURE
2.1
Short Story
Robert Diyanni (1990:23) said that, a short story is a brief work of literature,
usually written in narrative prose. Emerging from earlier oral storytelling traditions
in the 17th century, the short story has grown to encompass a body of work so
diverse as to defy easy characterization. At its most prototypical the short story
features a small cast of named characters, and focuses on a self-contained incident
with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood. In so doing, short stories make
use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components to a far greater degree than is
typical of an anecdote, yet to a far lesser degree than a novel. While the short story is
largely distinct from the novel, authors of both generally draw from a common pool
of literary techniques.
Short stories have no set length, in terms of word count there is no official
demarcation between an anecdote, a short story, and a novel. Rather, the form's
parameters are given by the rhetorical and practical context in which a given story is
produced and considered, so that what constitutes a short story may differ between
genres, countries, eras, and commentators. Like the novel, the short story's
predominant shape reflects the demands of the available markets for publication, and
the evolution of the form seems closely tied to the evolution of the publishing
industry and the submission guidelines of its constituent houses.
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Short story in general is a form of fiction, and is the most widely published
fiction such as science fiction, horror fiction, detective fiction, and others. The short
story is now also include other forms of non-fiction such as travel notes, lyrics and
prose post-modern variants as well as non-fiction such as fikto-critical or new
journalism. Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Short stories usually
focus on one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a limited number of
characters, including a short period of time. In the forms of longer fiction, stories
tend to contain certain core elements of dramatic structure: exposition (the
introduction setting, situation and main characters); complications (events in the
story that introduces the conflict); rising action, crisis (when decisive for the
protagonist and their commitment to a step); climax (the point of highest interest in
terms of the conflict and the point of the story with the most action); resolution (the
story where the conflict is resolved), and moral.
Because short, short stories can follow this pattern or may not. For example,
modern short stories only occasionally contained exposition. Much more common is
an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action. As in the
stories that are longer, plots of short stories also contain a climax, or turning point.
However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may (or may
not) have a moral or practical lesson. As with any art form, the hallmark of a
different short story by author. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShortStory, , short
story has 2 elements, namely:
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1. Intrinsic elements
Intrinsic elements are elements that build on the work itself. Intrinsic
elements of stories include:
• A theme is the main idea of a story, which is believed to be the source and
story.
• Background (setting) is the place, the time, the atmosphere contained in
the story. A story should be clear that the course, when it happened and
when the state of the atmosphere as well as the story progresses.
• Plot (plot) is the arrangement of the event or events that make up a story.
• characterization is to describe the nature or character of a person's
character can be seen from three aspects, namely through: character
dialogue, character description and depiction of physical character.
2. Extrinsic elements
Extrinsic elements are elements that are outside of literature, but it does not
directly affect the structure or organism system literature. Extrinsic elements include:
•
The values in the story (religious, cultural, political, economic).
•
Background of life of the author.
•
The social situation when the story was invented.
In analyzing a literary work, such as a short story, we need to apply some
approaches to get the better ideas of understanding of how to analyze this literary
work. These approaches can be applied to analyze a literary work itself. In this case,
the writer applies intrinsic approach to analyze a short stories from the outside of its
text. Three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe; ‘Berenice’, The Black Cat’, and ‘The
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Masque of The Red Death’ bringging madness characters as its main topic brings the
analysis of the short stories to intrinsic approach. Because, human behaviors and
mental processes are nothing less than the substance of our lives: our actions, our
thoughts, our attitudes, our moods, even our hope and dreams.
The object of literature is human being. Both of this sciences study about
human behavior or character and human development. Literature consists of the
character who conducts a story while everything that relates to the characters such as
attitude or behavior and morality are part of psychology. The writer usess his feeling
and emotion in his works. It also happens on the readers, they will use their feeling
and emotion in reading the literary works because the works are coming from the
experience of the writer himself and the experience from other people (Wellek and
Warren, 1956:81-93).
This thesis discusses about the characters as the intrinsict elements, focusing
on Madness and characteristic of madness itself, which is somehow developed the
character’s personality. These reading materials like Theory of Literature by Rene
Wellek and Austin Warren. Character is an important element because the actor is
human, so the definition of character and madness characters will be explained in the
next poin.
2.2
Character
Robert Diyanni (1990:35-38) said that, Indeed, if one reason we read stories
is to find out what happens (to see how the plot works out), an equally compelling
reason is to follow the fortunes of the characters. Plot and character in fact, are
inseparable: we are often less concerned with “what happened, than with what
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happened to him or her. Although fictional characters cannot step out of the pages
ogf their stories. We grant them a kind of reality equivalent to if not identical with
our own. In doing so we make an implied contract with the writer to suspend our
disbelief that his or her story is “just a story”. And instead take what happens as if it
were real.
Character is very important in real-made creation of literary works such as
novel,short story, drama or even some of poems. The nature of character presentation
brings a positive impact for readers to find out what is going on and what it is for. In
short, we approach fictional characters with the same concerns with which we
approach people. We need to be alert for how we are to take them. For what we are
to make of them, and we need to see how they may reflrct our own experience. We
need to observe their actions. To listen to what they say and how they say it. to nonce
how they relate to other characters and how other characters respond to them.
Especially to what they say about each other.
Character in fiction can be conveniently classified as major and minor, static
and dynamic. A major character is an important figure at the center of the story’s
action or theme. Usually a character’s status as major or minor is clear. On occasion,
however not one but two character’s may dominate a story.
The major character is sometimes called a protagonis whose conflict with an
antagonis may spark the story’s conflict. Supporting the major character are one or
more secondary or minor characters whose function is partly to illuminate the major
characters. Minor characters are often static or unchanging: they remain the same
from the beginning of a work to the end. Dynamic characters, on the other hand,
exhibit some kind of change of attitude, of purpose, of behavior of the story.
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E. M Forster (1990:73-80) said that, distinguishes two kinds of characters,
those are: Flat character is constructed round a single idea or quality, unchanging and
static, at the end of the short story he is essentially what he has been throughout, his
response is predictable and Round character is a charcter portrayed in the round,
profoundly altered by his experiences, he does not embody a single or quality but it
much more complex, his responses take us by surprise.
Kennedy (1991:47) said that, character is an imagined person who exists in
the story. Moreover, characters in short story have been especially created by the
author. Characterization is the author’s way of describing his characters in a literary
work or the author’s means of differentiating one character to another. Characters are
closely related to plot because character means action, while action from the plot of
literary work. An author may presents his characters in two general ways, they are:
(1) directly, telling his readers the characters’ qualities and (2) through actions,
showing the characters’ deeds by which his characters may be revealed.
It has often been assumed that characters in a literary work can be judged
from four levels of characterization. They are helpful for us to see the very basic
description of characters. The four levels are :
a. Physical: physical level supplies such basic facts, as sex, age, and size. It
is simplest level of characterization because it reveals external traits only.
b. Social: social level of characterization includes economic status,
profession, religion, family and social relationships.
c. Psychological: this level reveals habitual responses, attitudes, desires,
motivation, like and dislike-the inner working of the mind, both
emotional and intellectual which lead to action. Since feeling, thought
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and behavior define a character more fully than physical and social traits
and since a literary work usually arises from desires in conflict, the
psychological level is the most essential parts of characterization.
d. Moral: moral decision more clearly differentiate character than any other
level of characterization. The choices made by a character when he is
faced with a moral crisis show whether he is selfish, a hypocrite, or he is
the one who always acts according to his belief. A moral decision usually
causes a character to examine his own motives and values, and in the
process his true nature is revealed both to himself and to the readers.
A characters who stands as a representative of particular class or group of
people is known as a type. Some types of characters are: Stereotyped characters do
not represent individuals but a group of people, profession, etc they act according to
a set of pattern; Stock characters appeared from dramatic situation such as triangle
love affair; Allegorical characters are usually not given human names but they
represent human attitudes and emotions and author uses names taken from the
characters’ role representing their attitudes, behavior, etc; Full-dimension characters
usually described at greater length, more detail and capable of greater individuation.
From the above, that the allegorical character types found in the three short
stories written by Edgar Allan Poe, where a character's name is not given human
names and no clear origins and also overall emotional attitude of the characters are
written by the author.
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2.3
Madness Of The Character
Madness of character is one of the Ghotic elements, which is almost always
appears in Ghotic fiction. It is a change of the character’s attitude, which is
influenced by evil thought, crime, superstition belief, and obsession and so on,
usually the characters that get mad are male characters while the women are in
distress. As an appeal to the pathos and sympathy of the reader, the female characters
often face events that leave them fainting, terrified, screaming, suffering and
destroyed by the madness that consumes the male character. In order to find out the
madness of the character in this story, in this thesis, I will analyse it by focusing on
the characterization of the characters of the stories.
Madness or insanity, has been recognized throughout history in every known
society. Primitive cultures turned to witch doctors or shamans to apply magic, herbal
mixtures, or folk medicine to rid deranged persons of evil spirits or bizarre behavior,
for example; Archaeologists have unearthed skulls (at least 7000 years old) that have
small round holes bored in them using flint tools. It has been conjectured that the
subject may have been thought to have been possessed by devils which the holes
would allow to escape. However, more recent research on the historical practice of
trepanation supports the hypothesis that this procedure was medical in nature and
intended as means of treating cranial trauma.
As been cited in An Introduction to Fiction, by X. J. Kennedy (1976 : 11, 12),
every story hinges on the actions undertaken by its main character, or protagonist, a
term drawn from ancient Greek tragedy that is more useful in discussions of fiction
that such misleading terms as hero or heroine. Additionally, stories may contain an
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opposing character, or antagonist, with whom the protagonist is drawn into conflict.
Development and motivation are also important in any consideration of a story’s
characters. Characters can be termed either static or dynamic, depending on the
degree to which they change in the course of the story. In some stories, writers may
try to plug directly into a character’s thought by using interior monologue, a direct
presentation of thought that is somewhat like a soliloquy in drama or stream-ofconsciousness, an attempt to duplicate raw sensory data in the same disorder state
that the mind receives it.
Description of characters also helps us to understand the writer inten. In real
life we are told from an early age not to judge people by external appearance, but in
fiction the opposite is more often the case: physical description is invariably a sign of
what lurks beneath the surface. Given the brevity of most short stories, these physical
details may be minimal but revailing in their lack of particulars.
The problematic characteristics of people with antisocial personality disorder
are enduring in nature. That is their problems begin in childhood and continue
throughout most of their adulthood. As children, many of them had serious problems
with implus control, the ability to restrain the gratification of one’s immediate needs
or desire, and were regarded as having a conduct disorder. Children with conduct
disorder get in trouble at home, in school and in their neighborhood. The more
frequent and diverse the childhood antisocial acts are, the more likely the individual
is to have a life-long pattern of antisocial disorder.
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Barlow (1995:533-534) explain, that the causes of antisocial personality
disorder are from biological dimension: genetic influences, family, twin, and
adoption studies all suggest a genetic influence on both antisocial personality
disorder and criminality. Derek Russell Davis in his book An introduction to
psychopathology, explains that the causes of the disorder among others: external
agents affecting the brain directly, e.g. alcohol, drug or violence producing injury;
and events and circumstances outside the person which compose his experience.
In real life we are told from an early age not to judge people by outward
appearance, but the opposite is more common fiction: a physical description is
always a sign of what lurks beneath the surface. Due to the short story is the shortest,
the physical details may be minimal but the lack of specific revailing.
o Criteria for Madness Personality Disorder
Some of the characteristics of the madness personality which quoted from
sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madness/Sadistic_personality_disorder, they
are:
1.
Is amused by, or takes pleasure in, the psychological or physical suffering
of others (including animals).
2.
Has lied for the purpose of harming or inflicting pain on others (not merely
to achieve some other goal).
3.
Gets other people to do what he or she wants by frightening them (through
intimidation or even terror).
4.
Restricts the autonomy of people with whom he or she has close
relationship (e.g., will not let spouse leave the house unaccompanied or
permit teenage daughter to attend social functions).
5.
Is fascinated by violence, weapons, martial arts, injury, or torture.
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2.4
Romanticism
Romanticism in literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the rise or
criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and
children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wild,
loose and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan
Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural / occult and
human psychology. Romanticism tended to think of satire as something not worth
serious attention, prejudice is still influential today.
During the Age of Reason in the Seventeenth Century, Romantic unavoidable
fell into increasing disrepute, so that it is found alongside with ‘bombastic’,
‘ridiculous’ and ‘childish’. Not long afterward, Romantic begins recover its status
from a term of depreciation to a term that occurs in association with ‘fine’. Romantic
could then mean captivating to the imagination.
The exact meaning of the term is matter of substantial debate. According to
Brunetiere: Romantic is a movement to honor whatever classicism rejected.
Classicism is the regularity of good sense,− prefection in moderation; Romanticism
is disorder in the imagination
─the rage of incorrectness. A bilnd wave of literary
egotism, while Rousseau defines Romanticism is the return to the nature. Victor
Hugo defines Romanticism as liberalism in literature. Mingling the grotesque with
the tragic or sublime (forbidden by classicism) the complete truth of life and thought
of the Middle Age.
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The word ‘romantic’ was caught by the influential German critics Friedrich
and August Wilhem who gave it more a deeper and more specific group of
meanings; and through out the nineteenth century the term became more widely used
for the simple reason that nothing better appeared. The Schlegel brothers were
interested in defining a contrast between the art and literature of the classical world
and that of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (which they called ‘modern in
antithesis to ‘ancient’). The ‘Romantic’ refuses to recognize restraint in subject
matter or form and so is free to represent the abnormal grotesque and monstrous and
to mingle standpoints, genres, mode of expression (such as philosophy and poetry)
and events the separate arts in a single works.
The Gothic Novel, starting with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
(1764), an important precursor of one strain of romanticism, with a fun horror and
threat, and wonderfully exotic setting, suitable in the case of Walpole by his role in
the early revival of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne
(1759-1767) introduced a weird version of the anti-rational public sentimental novels
of English literature.
Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as
"romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it
is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the
fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and
about their world. It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of
the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the
romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German
literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period,
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beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and
Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in
1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe.
 Some aspects of Romanticism
Some
aspect
of
Romanticism,
which
quoted
from
sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ensiklopedia/Romanticism,. they are:
•
Imagination
The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate
"shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative
powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power,
with many functions. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to
constitute reality, we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.
•
Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often
presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic
language. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing
natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this is as true
of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry.
•
Symbolism and Myth
Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception
of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of
nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could
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simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-toone communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the
"inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to
symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.
•
The Individualism
The Individualism of this period is also reflected in the preference for individual
and particular description. When their predecessors saw a man as a social animal,
saw him in his daily relations with his fellows, the Romantics saw him essentially in
solitary state, self –communing. Where the Augustan emphasized those features that
men have in common, the interest that bring them together, the Romantics
emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind, they exalted the atypical,
even the bizarre, they honoured the hermit, the outcast, the rebel. In the others words,
the Romantic period, the age of burgeoning free enterprise and revolutionary hope,
was also an age of radical individualism, in which both the philosophers and poet put
an immensely higher estimate, on human potentialities and powers.
•
Supernatural and Strangeness
It is known that some Romantic poets escaped into a more beautiful past or
future, while others into the realm of supernatural. Consequently, the ‘Ghotic’ stories
focus much on the idea of the past and old world, for example A Ghotic building or
an ancient house, old places, darkness and moonlight. Or it might center on the idea
of in the form of he remote area, an escape from society, and alienation. Or it might
deal with supernatural by depicting the presence of ghosts, demonic or Satanic
characters and heavenly creatures.
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•
Ghotic and Mysterious
Ghotic in the term of literature can be defined as a melodramatic mode of fiction
in the late of eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. The word
‘ghotic’ had to mean ‘wild’ found it attractive to cultivate in reaction againts the
sedate new classicism of earlier with century culture. In literature, the ‘ghotic novel’
is a tale of terror with melodramatic and supernatural elements. Often these tales are
silly stories of violence and romantic love, set Oagaints the background of spooky
ancient castle, supernatural appearance and bloody murders. The plots hanged on
suspense and mystery, involving the fantastic and supernatural.
•
Illogical /unacceptable
As the basic maning of the word ‘illogical’; is without or contrary to logic, the
literary works of the Romanticism period much consists this elements, especially for
the ghotic novels and others horror stories.
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts.
Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis
on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called
for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical
reason.
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