SOURCE: Middlebro', Tom. “Imitatio Inanitatis: Literary Madness and the Canadian Short Story.” Canadian Literature, no. 107 (winter 1985): 189-93.

In the following excerpt, Middlebro' claims that Haliburton's “The Witch of Inky Dell” is a successful short story because its combination of gothic conventions, a morally ambiguous hero, and the theme of madness results in compassion for the characters and an “unsettling awareness of the unintelligible on the frontiers of reason.”

Plot in the short story may lead the reader's mind to an illumination of intelligibility, but sometimes it works to shatter the reader's comforting teleological expectations with evidence of irredeemable pointless waste. “I am not fond of expecting catastrophes,” wrote the Reverend Sidney Smith, “but there are cracks in the world.” The cracks in the design must be undetermined, gratuitous; the imaginatively corrigible does not disorientate, nor strip the reader's mind of all save bewildered compassion. The unwanted death of...