Yumiko Iwata

This paper examines surprise, one of the major narrative interests, with a main focus on how readers read short stories with surprise ending or twists by conducting a full-scale survey of a small group of real readers.  The simple survey modelled on the method of Kuiken and others tested whether the theoretical model of narrative surprise creation proposed in my earlier work is plausible enough to explain experience of narrative surprise.  The three short stories, “The Open Window” by Saki and two of the nonfictional stories based on true stories anthologized in Paul Auster’s I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project, were used to collect written comments of the readers.  The results supported the model of narrative surprise: the readers read and understood parts of the story before the surprise ending or twists roughly in the same manner as the character and the writer perceive and recognise the episode/situation, while becoming increasingly engaged with the narrative episode/situation as the story progresses.  The survey also obtained the results that all the readers enjoyed reading nonfictional narrative as much as or more than the short story which is more literary.