ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine the representation of ageing and care in the modern and contemporary North American short story. It will argue that recent experiments in the form of the short story have been a response to the particular features and dilemmas of advanced old age. The customary attention to time and space in the short story in particular make it an appropriate vehicle for the examination of later life, and this chapter will use Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (a literary trope bring space and time into relation) to read both content and form of the stories in question. The task of capturing a sense of ending, whether individual or global (and environmental), is one both challenging for and suited to this form. Similarly, the experience of seclusion and stasis that is sometimes imposed on those in later life, and the dynamics of the “closed system” of the institution, are captured in innovative ways in short fiction. The stories in question capture the ambiguities and dilemmas of a stage of life that is both exposed and neglected, constantly surveilled and eluding many markers of social identification and belonging. The older people in these stories are not bowed or helpless, however: the narrators’ outlook is frequently shrewd and their tone acerbic, probing and refuting societal and intergenerational assumptions. And this tone is a satiric strategy: it cuts through the material or emotional “stuff” of daily living to lay bare the systemic inequities that underpin both provision and exclusion in later life. The exemplars of such a strategy include the American writers John Barth, Margaret Atwood and Joy Williams.
