The Man In The Woods And The Summer People By Kelly Link

It is impossible to write anything new. Everything has already been done, already been said, but writers take inspiration where they can get it, read what other people have written, and this encourages them to write something of their own. They add to the ongoing conversation. Sometimes, experimentation with writing happens as writers feel the need to, maybe not say something completely new, but to say it in an innovative way. This is how new genres, such as American fabulism, are born, coming out of comparable stories like “The Man in the Woods” by Shirley Jackson and “The Summer People” by Kelly Link. There are many distinguishable features belonging to fabulist stories, so many that not all of them could be named, and Jackson and Link incorporate just a few. Both use realism as the canvas for fabulist elements, write in ways that inspire a tone typically associated with fabulism, and integrate aspects of folklore into the magic of the story. This paper is going to compare and …show more content…
From here on out, the reader knows to expect something more from this story. The story goes on to have these characters interact, in a way, with these summer people without explaining how the summer people can exist. Link even goes as far as to have Fran, the protagonist, say that she does not know where the summer people come from. However, like Jackson’s “The Man in the Woods,” no real explanation is necessary. Among the details of the setting, Link also has the subplot of the trouble that Fran’s father is in, and, to a certain degree, Fran dealing with the fact that her mother essentially abandoned her, themes that give the audience something to relate to. Because of the grounded, realistic details at the beginning of both stories, the reader trusts wherever the writer goes with the stories and does not question the parts of them that are