In Maugham’s The Lotus Eater, the dialogue is very brief and pointed, although in some cases Wilson is attributed rather a long speech. The limited span of the short story naturally makes it imperative to observe the utmost economy in dialogue as well as description. Of course, references are made to the friend’s wife, Wilson’s maid, and her husband and the hostess of the inn, but they have no positive role or function in the action of the story. Maugham’s The Lotus Eater has very few characters, mainly three, the hero Wilson, the author himself, and his friend. It is absurd, rather abnormal to have a galaxy of men and women as in Dickens’s novels, in a short story. The brevity of its theme naturally involves the restriction in the portraiture of characters in a short story. These are all perfectly unified, Thus the oneness of the plot is well retained by Maugham, and the story never runs out of the bound of the hero, Wilson, whose story is kept well-knit by the narrator. As the story is told by him, in the first person, the unity of the plot-structure is well retained through his own account of Wilson’s life as a bank manager, his leisurely, delightful life of ease and comfort at Capri and his tragic suffering, after the lapse of twenty-five years, and death.
The central character of the story is Thomas Wilson, and the author presents the three stages of his life in a perfectly symmetrical order.
The Lotus Eater has a single theme–the story of a man who forsakes his life of work and wages to enjoy absolute leisure and pleasure for twenty-five years in the bosom of nature in the ideal realm of Capri. The short span of a short story, as implied, calls for the brevity of the theme, which also implies the unity of the plot. Nevertheless, the story here is nothing long or elaborate, and much shorter than Forster’s The Eternal Moment. Or course, in length it is much longer than Katherine Mansfield’s The Fly or James Joyce’s Araby. Maugham’s The Lotus Eater, for instance, is definitely a short tale covering some fourteen pages. It well reveals not merely his art of story-telling, but also the special features that distinguish the modern short story as a particular literary type.Ī short story, as the very name signifies, is short and the implication is that the tale here must be briefly told. The Lotus Eater is quite an impressive short story from him. Somerset Maugham is a reputed short story writer. Though brevity is its chief feature, a short story is found to bear some other distinctive marks such as the singleness of impression, paucity in characterization, the economy in detail and description, and so on. As Hudson states so finely, it is that which can be read at a single sitting. But it is specifically different in all these matters from what is seen in a novel.
The short story has all the characteristics of a full-length novel-plot, characters, situations, and the mode of expression. Precision and brevity in all matters are the golden rules of a good short story. It is actually a prose narrative that deals with some affair of human life in a compact and concise way. It is something between a novel and an anecdote. The short story is a specific literary type.
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