The world of art in short stories by Y Ban

Research to discover the narrator's image is also an aspect to discover the content and art of the work.

From those concepts and important characteristics of the narrator, every writer when starting to compose a narrative work always consciously chooses for himself a suitable narrator. Surveying the short story Y Ban, we found that there are the following types of narrators:

3.2.1. Narrator:

Y Ban lets the characters tell their own stories, contemplate and perceive themselves. The woman tells about her life with the artist man and his son ( Me and you - the boy and the snake ). The character's confession moves the reader: "The first time you called me a bitch. Just a little bit of pride left was enough for me to leave you and go. But I just quietly went to the hospital to remove the fetus, a statue that you gave me. I seem to have absorbed your philosophy: - Beauty does not go hand in hand with goodness. To have beauty, sometimes you have to know how to sacrifice goodness. I am an artist, I create beauty, so don't ask me to be responsible for being a human being in this life. You made two statues. One was a boy with a complete body. You said it was a statue of a boy. Another statue had only a head, you gave it to me. Both statues were very beautiful. Every night when he was not by my side, I would take the statue and hold it to my chest and cry. I began to feel sorry for myself.”

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In the story Why Love, Y Ban leads readers to Quan's virtual world through chat language. From the virtual world, Quan fell in love with Van Anh in the real world. But he missed his appointment with her: "Van Anh made an appointment with me at New Year's Eve at Tap Ken flower garden. Now it's 4 hours until New Year's Eve. I'll just walk around the city . Telling myself that, Quan's feet turned towards

the street named Temple of Literature. The thoughts were jumbled in Quan's head." And finally Quan "understood that the love between him and Van Anh started from reason and heart. Because he forgot to ask about the touch of hands and skin".

The Night Bus is the story of Tran and a young girl hitchhiking. They chatted happily and Tran even lent the girl a jacket to keep warm. The image of the girl haunted Tran, forcing him to go to her house. But surprisingly, it was a dead girl and the place where she got off the bus was her grave. "After that, Tran met Phuong many times. Until the old woman passed away, he took care of her like his mother." This magical story is told through the character's narration, very realistic and vivid.

By letting the characters tell their own stories, revealing their own thoughts, feelings, and emotions, Y Ban has made readers believe more in his stories. Stories using this form have revealed a tendency to write as a need to present one's own experiences. The narrator at this time erases his narrative distance to dialogue with the reader. The character tells his own life story, confides his own feelings. Sometimes, readers feel like the writer "puts himself into the work" to express the need to express and confide through the character.

3.2.2. The narrator outside the story:

Y Ban lets the narrator claim that he is “recording” the story in Miraculous Life : “When I write down these stories, I still wonder if these are real stories or dreams. I often have very strange dreams that cannot be explained. I have told myself many times that I will write down those strange dreams. Now the stories haunt me in every detail. I have decided to write them down.” In the collection of stories, Mieu Hoang, Y Ban named part II “Stories

picked up along the way” with 6 short stories with fantasy elements. Angel's Cry I is a story about a road accident witnessed by the Angel of the Night, Nam Tao and Bac Dau. Angel's Cry II is about a death row inmate who bit his tongue after talking to the Angel but could not find a way to escape the fear of "the moment of being taken to the execution ground". Abandoned Temple is a mysterious story about a girl in a green shirt and green shoes who died a long time ago, helping a lonely old woman. In Salty Land of the Hill , the mother who could not teach her son asked both the angel and the devil: "What should I do now?" and received the answer: "I don't know what to do either." In the end, she had to decide: "Then he will have to die. He has to die because there are three lives left to live in this world". Meanwhile, Story in the Forest gives readers a creepy feeling about the story of a woman who cooks glue. The last time the character “I” came to see her, “I suddenly felt creepy. Especially at that moment, the strange rays of sunlight shone through the green canopy of leaves onto the green mossy steps, shining with the brilliant colors of the seven rainbows.” It was this way of telling that made this magical story objective, realistic, and believable to the reader.

By “transforming” into those storytellers, Y Ban allows readers to draw profound lessons about how to behave for each life situation and even real life situations right in the reader’s heart. That has the power to generalize the eternal philosophies about life, society, and the universe in general that the human world always longs for.

3.3. The art of organizing situations and structures:3.3.1. Story situation:

In a short story, creating a unique situation is a very important factor that contributes to affirming talent and style.

of a writer. As Professor Nguyen Dang Manh said: "The most important thing in a short story is to create a certain situation, from which a character's personality or a mood is highlighted" . In addition, the construction and organization of situations in a short story not only "highlights a character's personality or a mood" but also shows a certain concept or thought of the writer in a view that reflects the reality of life. Surveying Y Ban's short stories, we found that the construction and organization of situations in her short stories clearly demonstrated this issue. And in general, Y Ban's short stories mainly revolve around the following types of situations:

3.3.1.1. Mood situation:

This is the type of situation that awakens the past, recalls memories, and most deeply expresses a person's emotional life. This situation is defined by Nguyen Minh Chau as "situations that occur within the mood and personality of the character". Meeting two friends: Leng and Son on the same bus trip is a situation that brings Mien back to her student days with her first love full of regret: "Leng, Son - those two names hit her memory, causing memories that are too far away but full of original innocence" ( God said that... ). The situation of having to abandon the little child in The Letter to Mother Au Co or the death of the man selling kohlrabi on a rainy afternoon in The String Connecting the Kites both make the story stop because of thoughts or lead thoughts back to the past. "Today I witnessed the pain of mothers. My pain flared up again and how many mothers have the same pain as me." – opening words of the story Letter to Mother Au Co. The daughter in the story is always tormented: “From then until now, mother has suffered her pain, I have suffered my pain. But has there ever been a night when mother woke up because of her pain? Every night, father

Mom is still together but I am awake with my pain. Mom, do you understand me?” At the end of the story, Y Ban makes a plea: “Mom, please care about us, about the pain of girls, mothers”. In After Lightning is Storm , the situation appears when the woman encounters a “kind face”. She is immersed in secret worries, judgments, comparisons of that man with her husband to finally make a wise decision: “We will be good friends.” In Minute for Love, the character’s thoughts create the story situation: “Tomorrow I am getting married. Sleepless nights with so many thoughts about the future, a sky full of happiness or a sea of suffering? How can we know in advance…”

With the mood situations, Y Ban focuses on exploiting the typical mood expressions of the characters around that situation. Thanks to that, the character's mood is pushed to the extreme, giving readers deep feelings about the spiritual life of women. This has created her own writing style that many readers love.

3.3.1.2. Self-awareness situation:

To create changes in the perception of the character, Y Ban put them in situations for the character to realize mistakes, to realize the truth of life. It was "insults to children, laments about life" and the dawn that made the girl in Heaven and Hell bitterly realize that heaven was just a sour and bitter phenomenon, realized that she was too trusting and naive to the point of getting lost in hell before she knew it. A call from a child made the woman break away from her dreams and end her adultery in her dreams ( Woman and Dreams ). Lying on the hospital bed, the woman had time to realize the deepest desires in herself, to awaken from fleeting love affairs: "Thinking back

I have conquered life, have sought joy, even money from men. But I have not had a single rose, a single kiss, a single gentle caress of true love.” ( Silicon Love Story ).

That situation can be a time for the character to justify, explain or struggle with inner struggles to awaken himself and perfect his personality. In Twenty-seven Steps to Heaven, Y Ban lets the girl realize that the man she admires is a dissolute playboy. The miserable and dizzying thought awakens her dream of heaven and lets her realize that she is still lucky because "in fact, if I had missed one step, I would have fallen into hell". The woman with magical power in the lonely and empty present laments: "I am a woman, a very perfect woman, but why can't I have the result of that perfection?" Y Ban lets the woman awaken to one thing: love affairs are not games for people to experiment with, they are places to express love, sharing and tolerance. Therefore, it is not a place to seek perfection. The woman born from the darkness suddenly woke up and felt ashamed and humiliated with herself, “how old the boy was, she had that many years with long days of self-torture”. Those moments made the woman more aware of her unfortunate fate. The woman standing in front of the mirror realized that literature or other men could not replace the children in her heart. She understood and awakened that she needed them and they “needed a mother who was a hare with a cleft lip more than a mother of honor”. Putting the character in a situation of self-awareness, Y Ban had the opportunity to delve into the character’s mood, exploring the depth of human emotions. Self-awareness is necessary for people to avoid mistakes and errors in life.

3.3.1.3. Dramatic situations:

Y Ban also puts his characters in dramatic situations to reveal their thoughts and feelings. The situation where the character I picked up the divorce summons paper that fell from the man's pocket helped both the character I and the reader understand: "There are too few minutes for love!" ( Minutes for love ). The story at the barrier also created a dramatic situation. The story can be considered a play staged from the lies of a father and daughter. The daughter lied to her father that the union organized a vacation for her, but in fact she went with an old man the same age as her father. The father refused to let his wife visit him on the pretext of receiving a special delegation, but in fact he went with a young girl. The play ended when the father and daughter encountered each other at the barrier with their lovers. The father was startled to see his son, and the son was confused to see his father. After that "shock", they were both in pain and disappointment. The father was shocked to learn that the daughter he loved with all his heart was no longer pure and obedient. The image of a father and the respect he had for him had also disappeared. The decline in moral character is threatening to damage the sacred feelings in the family. That tragedy will inevitably happen if family members do not change their lifestyle, thoughts and actions. In the story The Invisible Boy, Y Ban stands in the position of a child to evaluate the actions of adults. Children's souls are not deep enough to understand what adults do. But that does not mean that adults have the right to deceive and commit sinful acts in front of them. The situation where the boy got the tiger claw during the "detective" mission is clear evidence of what his mother did to the man in the park that day. The mother was not honest with her child about it. The broken trust and hatred made the boy unable to forgive anyone and

choose death as a way of release. His death is a wake-up call for parents.

3.3.2. Psychological structure:

Structure is considered the fundamental aspect of artistic creation. A work needs structure to make its artistic text a whole. When talking about structure, we often consider a work like an architectural work. That work requires the artist of words to know how to mold his life, to organize living materials in a certain period of time and space to create a whole with the highest value. To achieve that, shaping and organizing a unique structure requires the writer to constantly learn and create.

According to the Dictionary of Literary Terms : "Structure is the complex and vivid whole of a work" [4;131].

The book Literary Theory by Ha Minh Duc (editor-in-chief) states: “Structure is the creation and connection of parts in the composition of a work, the organization and arrangement of elements and materials that form the content of the work on the basis of objective life and in a certain ideological direction” [2;143]. According to this concept, structure is an element of form.

Le Tien Dung in the book Understanding Literary Works also stated: "Structure is the way to organize, arrange and link characters, events, emotions, and elements in a work into a unified artistic whole according to artistic intentions and artistic characteristics to make the work have the highest artistic value" [1;93].

The concept of structure seems to have expanded its scope. Over time, many modern scientific theorists have renewed and deepened it.

The world of art in short stories by Y Ban - 9

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