SOURCE: Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander and David Malcolm. “Jean Rhys's Art of the Short Story.” In Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 3-14. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Malcolm and Malcolm outline the defining characteristics of Rhys's short stories.

Narrators and Narration

One of the most striking aspects of narration in Rhys's short fiction is the variety of narrational devices that it employs. Rhys uses both female and nongendered narrators; the narrational tone ranges from the ironic (“Tout Montparnasse”) to the detached (“Kismet”) to the passionately engaged (“Let Them Call It Jazz” and “Temps Perdi”). She adopts subjective and objective points of view and deploys participant and nonparticipant narrators throughout her short fiction; she combines the techniques of narrated action with dialogue and free direct and indirect speech. Taken as a whole, her stories display a remarkable resourcefulness in narration.

In The Left...