SOURCE: Hottell, Ruth A. “The Delusory Denouement and Other Strategies in Maupassant's Fantastic Tales.” The Romanic Review 85, no. 4 (November 1994): 573-86.

In the following essay, Hottell examines the function of the ambiguous denouement of several of Maupassant's fantastic stories.

Tzvetan Todorov's seminal work, Introduction a la litterature fantastique, establishes the fantastic as a genre, defining it as a hesitation between the supernatural and the uncanny. The supernatural, like fantasy, deals with an “unreal” world, a world not defined in terms of the laws we know. In the world of the supernatural, frogs can turn into princes at the touch of the beautiful princess, and princesses can be awakened by the kiss of a heroic prince. The domain of the supernatural, then, is the realm of the fairy tale, of fantasy literature, in which the author's creative imagination knows no ground rules, no restraints in spinning the tale for the...