SOURCE: Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet. “The Ambiguous Grail Quest in ‘Shiloh.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 2 (spring 1995): 223–26.

In the following essay, Blythe and Sweet discuss the universal Grail myth and how it relates to the short story “Shiloh.”

Bobbie Ann Mason is often viewed as a minimalist, a contemporary school of fiction not without detractors. As Barbara Henning notes, “many critics … are suspicious of [minimalist] stories because of the lack of metaphoric depth” (690). Henning then refutes these critics by demonstrating in “Shiloh” that Mason employs synecdochic details (e.g., Leroy's body, the truck, crafts, kits, birds, and trade names) to create “a metaphoric frame for comparison and reflection” (690).

Mason not only employs these details, but, we contend, she undergirds “Shiloh” with a more complex, unified pattern. More specifically, Mason, in the tradition of such twentieth-century American writers as Eliot, Malamud, and Cheever, structures her story around one...