I was reading the New York Times Sunday magazine the other day and came across an interesting little item entitled "How to Tell A Ghost Story." If you've never written one, but would like to try your hand at it, the brief article is definitely worth a read.
The tips contained in the article are attributed to Ruth Robbins, professor of Victorian Literature at Leeds Beckett University in England, and she makes several interesting points, among them that people tend to be possessed by their possessions. That's a notion that authors of many genres of fiction might want to keep in mind.
I'm not a writer of ghost stories and don't intend to be one, but this article was very interesting to me for another reason: the idea that there is a dotted line between the living and the dead, as I briefly discussed in my previous post.
"Establish what kind of ghost is haunting the setting -- ideally a figure from the past with unfinished business," the NYT article advises.
The notion here is that a living person is haunted by a ghost because the ghost needs to complete some action or actions that were prevented by death. But a person could also feel haunted by a ghost, or a "shade" because he or she failed to do something before the other person died.
Looking at James Joyce once again, one could argue that in "The Dead," Gretta Conroy is haunted by the memory of Michael Furey who died at age 17. "I think he died for me," she tells her husband, who suddenly realizes his marriage is not what he thought it was. Gretta, one suspects, is haunted by the notion that she failed to adequately reciprocate Furey's love for her and thus caused or contributed to his untimely death.
The sort of ghost stories the NYT article is talking about are generally aimed at leaving readers or listeners unsettled. So, too, does "The Dead."
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