Short story cycle

A short story cycle (sometimes referred to as a story sequence or composite novel) is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts. Short story cycles are different from novels because the parts that would make up the chapters can all stand alone as a short story, each individually containing a beginning, middle and conclusion. When read as a group there is a tension created between the ideas of the individual stories, often showing changes that have occurred over time or highlighting the conflict between two opposing concepts or thoughts. Because of this dynamic, the stories need to have an awareness of what the other stories accomplish; therefore, cycles are usually written with the expressed purpose to create a cycle as opposed to being gathered and arranged later.

Scholars have pointed out that there is a wide range of possibilities that fall between simple collections and novels in their most-commonly understood form. One question is how well the stories stand up individually: chapters of a novel usually cannot stand alone, whereas stories in collections are meant to be fully independent. But many books have combined stories in such a way that the stories have varying degrees of interdependence, and it is these variations that cause problems in definition. Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, for instance, claim that the stories in a story cycle are more independent than those in a composite novel, and James Nagel points out that both cycle and sequence are misleading, since cycle implies circularity and sequence implies temporal linearity, neither of which he finds to be essential to most such collections. Rolf Lundén has suggested four types of cycles, in order of decreasing unity: the cycle, in which the ending resolves the conflicts brought up at the beginning (e.g., The Bridge of San Luis Rey); the sequence, in which each story is linked to the ones before it but without a cumulative story that ties everything together (e.g., The Unvanquished); the cluster, in which the links between stories are not always made obvious and in which the discontinuity between them is more significant than their unity (e.g., Go Down, Moses); and the novella, in the classical sense of a collection of unrelated stories brought together by a frame story and a narrator(s) (e.g., Winesburg, Ohio).[All examples are Lundén's]

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