Visitor and The Speckled Band Fitting into the Short Story Genre

Visitor and The Speckled Band Fitting into the Short Story Genre

The aspects of a typical short story genre are a misleading title, an

unsure opening, little knowledge of characters, short time scale,

little setting and a typical ending. In the two short stories '

Visitors ' and ' The Adventure of The Speckled Band ' there are

aspects of both stories which show a typical short story genre.

In ' Visitor ' the title is suggesting that the story will have a

visitor of some description

but this could be a relative, friend or even an unexpected guest. Also

it may be a planned visit but either way the title is a misleading

one. The visitor in ' Visitor ' is robber yet

in this story a robber isn't an unwanted guest but an expected one. In

reply the police are unwanted guests who not expected. " This is a

robbery ", this is not the sort of thing we would call normal but in '

Visitor ' it is. The robbers in ' Visitor ' are " professional people

" where as the police are not. With the police being described as "

young men " something which normally would be described as robbers.

The roles have been reversed in ' Visitor ' with the robbers being the

usual visitors and the police being the unwanted visitors.

The opening of a short story is always very unsure and brief. " Not

again, not so soon! " here the audience is thrown straight into the

story without really knowing anything about what is going on. The very

start of ' Visitor ' is anonyous " she saw the mini bus ", gives the

story a scared and nervous beginning. " The knocking was confident but

not intimidating. Civilised ", This being unexpected as you wouldn't

expect this of a robber but more of somebody you were expecting or

somebody you were aquainted with.The thought of 3 men, 2 well

proportioned, 1 normal size would normally be quite threatening but

not in ' Visitor '.

The characters in ' Visitor ' are normal yet unauthodox yet

methodically they worked. The roles have been reveresed. With the

robbers being civil and the police being unprofessional. There is no

real main character and all of the characters are only briefly

described. The universal figure in ' Visitor ', Mrs Morrison is

somebody we as the audience find little about. Also with it being a

short story there is not much time to envolve that many characters in

it so there are only very few.

The timescale of a short story is only very short and this can create