Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE COLLECTED EDITION I beg the reader not to be deceived by the fact that these stories are told in the first person singular into thinking that they are experiences of my own. There are three ways in which an author can tell a story. He can tell it from the standpoint of God, as one who knows everything there is to know about the persons he is concerned with; he sees their every action and is acquainted with their most intimate thoughts. On this plan many of the greatest novels in the world have been written and on it Maupassant and Chekov wrote many of their best stories. It is a simple plan and a good one. Its inconvenience is its impersonality, for it is not playing the game if the author steps down (as Trollope and Thackeray too frequently did) and comments on his characters and their affairs in his own person. Then he is just as much part of the story as though he were an actor in it. Objectivity is apt to give a slight sensation of bleakness. Complete objectivity is probably impossible to achieve. It would indeed make a novel of an unwieldy length and the short story almost impossible. For a complete objectivity would see all the persons of the fiction from their own standpoint, since each one of us is of supreme importance to himself, and there is no reason for the author to pay more vii