A small point about short stories

 Here is a minor thing, but a remarkable thing, about short stories: There are some stories that make an impression on you that don’t bear rereading.

I read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in high school and was properly thunderstruck. But I have never been able to get through it again.

I thought it might just be me. But I ran across the critic Harold Bloom’s remark about “The Lottery.” He said it “wounds you once and once only.”

Bloom was harsher in his judgment of J.D. Salinger’s “Seymour: An Introduction.” Bloom found it impossible to reread. He faulted its smug spirituality and said the story fails the test of narrative value.

That may be why Salinger’s fiction stopped. Contemplation can be a very valuable mode of being and existence, but it has no stories to tell.

I do like contemplation. I read essays as well as stories. But the professor’s point is taken.

• Source: Harold Bloom, Short Story Writers and Short Stories; Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005, p. 151.