SOURCE: Mortimer, Armine Kotin. “Second Stories.” In Short Story: Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, pp. 276-98. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Mortimer analyzes Maupassant's use of second-story construction in several of his stories.

It is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the undercurrent of the theme—which turns into prose … the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”

Poetry is not alone in having an undercurrent of suggested meaning that risks platitudes as soon as it is exposed. I have been collecting examples of short stories that owe their “wow” to the careful embedding of a second story in the first.¹ Indeed, the action of these stories on the reader is such that the reader is actively solicited to recognize that...