What is the author's style in Guests of the Nation by Frank O'Connor?

The collection contains fifteen short stories, ranging from less than ten pages to over twenty. Each of the stories is told by a single narrative voice, but the type of character telling the story can vary greatly from story to story. There is much dialogue in each of the stories, and this tends to be the driving force for many of them.

The narrators also tend to pose questions to the reader at the end of the stories. Each of the stories contains one major plot, but as they are short stories, the nature of these plots can be somewhat subdued in comparison to a novel. Many of these plots end in an unsatisfactory manner, which is to say unfavorably for the characters, but this works well with many of the points O’Connor is trying to make with his fiction.