SOURCE: “Plot-Resistant Narrative and Russell Banks's ‘Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, Summer, 1994, pp. 407–13.

In the following essay, Leckie analyzes Banks's narrative technique in “Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat.”

If much of contemporary literary theory emphasizes the cultural production of class, race, and gender in American fiction, contemporary fiction that utilizes the resources of narrative minimalism to explore issues of cultural division—fiction by such writers as Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Susan Minot, and Russell Banks—increasingly provides the context for critical debate. The refusal to elaborate plot or to use plot to suggest a narrator who controls interpretation, becomes itself a strategy that allows the reader to observe clearly the boundaries between the story's minimal plot and the way the socially produced narratives invoked by the story enforce cultural division. If we conceive of...