SOURCE: "The Enigma of The Ebony Tower: A Genre Study," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 135-47.

Below, Alderman shows how a fundamental convention of the short story genre informs the themes and structure of The Ebony Tower.

The stories collected in John Fowles's The Ebony Tower constitute two books. One book is a grouping of stories written and translated by one author, apparently associated with but not fastened to each other very firmly, to be read in any order, with or without reflection on the whole. The second book, however, is an integrated collection of short stories, a contemporary example of the genre that includes 1001 Nights, Merrie Tales of Skelton, and Dubliners, to name some others spanning the centuries and cultures. This genre has developed through a long history predating and then coexisting with the novel and, more recently, with the unintegrated collection of stories...