Strategie della narrazione breve

The choice to narrate by keeping within the minimal boundaries of an insurmountable limit tells us that brevity is not just a matter of measures, dimensions, contraintes, but rather a matter of strategies: the short story - unlike the novel - imposes the need for allusive movements that free it from the pure mechanisms of plot, from which the novel can never completely disregard, and liken it to poetry. The American poet and novelist Raymond Carver - undisputed master of the art of the short story - said he found more similarities between writing a short story and writing a poem than between writing a short story and writing a novel. And so while it is true that the sermo brevis, in scholastic rhetoric, is a quality of formalization, it is equally true that the specifics of brevity (the “brevity effect” as Paul Zumthor calls it) probably consists precisely in its allusive nature, in its openness, thus in the greater importance it acquires in the reader's process of collaboration.