The Ghost In The Mill And Rip Van Winkle's

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Some may say that the written word is solely influenced by the spoken; that one’s written thoughts are a direct result of something one has personally said, heard, or interpreted. Others will argue that a story told through continuous verbal translation can only lead to a less significant conclusion than that which was originally intended. Regardless, establishing a definition for the relationship between the custom of oral tradition and the short story as a literary genre proves to be a complex argument. Oral tradition is thought to have allowed the short story genre to emerge as a tool of knowledge – to create new ideas in a permanent text rather than preserving those of oral cultures. Debates and opinions aside, the real question lies not…show more content…
For example, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, was not primarily conversational, and thus would not benefit as much from being orally told like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Ghost in the Mill or Samuel Clemens’s Cannibalism in the Cars. Where Irving takes the reader on a more personal creative literary journey – void of a separate storyteller though filled with imagery and vivid landscapes allowing the reader to make their own determinations – Stowe allows for a dialect advantageous of being acted aloud. Upon reading The Ghost in the Mill, you want to actually hear Sam Lawson tell the story, to know every aspect of the story and every word spoken by the characters in exactly the way he tells it, just like the children have learned to. Through stories like Stowe’s, written using dialect heavy in Southern slave culture, the need for a storyteller becomes more apparent, aiding in understanding the story’s tone. Likewise, in Clemens’s Cannibalism in the Cars, the written description only serves for so many creative possibilities; it is the storyteller that really brings the story to life. It is through the narratives of these stories (and several others) that one determines how oral tradition allows for a more innovative depiction. To take on the speaking role of a written text is to breathe life into a literary character, making the character real, and allowing for a number of creative interpretations to a literary genre demanding the memorization of characters and
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