More "Short Sixes" — A Reader’s Guide

The Ironic Narrator and His Asides

Across the excerpts, Bunner’s narrator frequently steps forward to comment on the action or the characters. In 'The Cumbersome Horse,' the description of Mr. Skinner is layered with qualifying phrases: 'too familiar with his big, knobby, red hands; too furtive with his small, close-set eyes.' The repetition of 'too' builds a rhythm of mild disgust. Later, in 'What Mrs. Fortescue Did,' the narrator inserts a parenthetical explanation of a thousand-mile ticket, calling it 'a delightful device' that gives its owner 'more of a feeling of pride and independence than anything else this life has to offer.' These asides create a confiding tone, as if the narrator is sharing a private joke with the reader. They also slow the narrative, inviting attention to social details rather than plot momentum.

Pacing Through Epistolary and Reported Speech

Bunner varies pace by embedding letters and reports within the narrative. In 'What Mrs. Fortescue Did,' the shift from third-person narration to Mrs. Filley’s misspelled report—'i sene the gerl She had or to hav cod-livor roil'—abruptly changes the rhythm. The reader must decode the phonetic spelling, slowing down. Then Mrs. Fortescue’s polished rewrite, beginning 'It gives me the greatest pleasure,' restores a smooth, formal cadence. This contrast highlights the gap between the characters’ literacy and social performance. The story also compresses time: 'the reports kept on coming in the same fine Italian hand' after Mrs. Filley’s death, accelerating the narrative while the deception continues. Bunner uses such shifts to control how quickly the reader absorbs information.

Recurring Details of Setting and Character

Bunner grounds his stories in precise, often unglamorous settings. The farmhouse in 'The Cumbersome Horse' is 'standing lonely and desolate in its ragged meadows of stubble and wild-grass on the unpleasantly steep mountain-side.' The adjectives 'lonely,' 'desolate,' 'ragged,' and 'unpleasantly steep' accumulate to create a mood of disappointment. In 'What Mrs. Fortescue Did,' the Old Ladies’ Home is described through the residents’ limited perspective: they see Mrs. Filley 'put on her Sunday black silk and take her silent way to the railroad station.' The detail of the black silk dress suggests ritual and secrecy. Characters are often defined by small, telling habits—Mr. Skinner’s 'profuse' tobacco juice, Mrs. Filley’s defective spectacles. These recurring physical details anchor the stories in a tangible world, even as the plots turn on misunderstandings or deceptions.

Bunner’s stories reward attention to how they are told as much as what they tell. The narrators’ asides, the embedded documents, and the careful description of mundane objects all shape the reader’s experience of time and tone. Readers may find it useful to note when the narrator steps in to comment, and to compare the pace of the opening paragraphs with the more compressed passages later in each story. The collection offers a study in the craft of the short story at the turn of the century, before modernism reshaped narrative conventions.

Reading Bunner’s stories about miscommunication, I recalled the quiet ache of letters never fully understood in my own life. Then I thought of Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches — Story, Setting & Ideas, whose measured, observant tone gave me that same reflective hush, a feeling of lives unfolding just beyond my hearing, patient and unresolved.