In the following excerpt, Argyle points out that while White is primarily known as a novelist, his short stories show the same “intelligence” and “wealth of experience” that mark the author's longer fiction.
In the following review, Hassall praises White, contending that the author's writing shows he is “clear-eyed,” compassionate, and “can tell a good old-fashioned story extremely well.”
In the following essay, Burrows illustrates how White uses observations and anecdotes about Australian society in his fiction as a form of social satire.
In the following excerpt, Weigel surveys the critical reception of White's short story collections and points out that White's short stories “employ diverse techniques for a wide range of effects like the author's novels.”
In the following essay, Brady praises White's story “Down at the Dump,” calling it one of the author's most interesting stories “for the insight it offers into people and society.”
In the following essay, Wilson praises White's short story “Down at the Dump,” asserting that it “demonstrates the superb adroitness with which White can modulate his discourse among many functions—satiric, compassionate, speculative—and give it a dimension that is metaphysical, even religious, in its range.”
In the following excerpt, Myers examines the title story of The Cockatoos, asserting that it “is not a short story but a remarkably compressed novella” that integrates complex narrative methods and variations in mood.
In the following essay, Shepherd views “The Twitching Colonel,” one of White's earliest short stories, as a harbinger of themes that surface later in the author's fiction.
In the following review, Avant maintains that the short story form “demands immediate rapport between artist and audience; and White, the most austere of modern novelists, isn't an intimate writer.”
In the following essay, Beston asserts that the short story form “does not offer White the space he needs for his greatest strength,” which is the portrayal of his characters' fantasies.
In the following review, Nelson asserts that “Dead Roses” is one of the best works in The Burnt Ones and shows how White uses myth to add comedy to the story.
In the following essay, Lindsay praises The Burnt Ones, saying White's work “shows some important advances and makes clearer than ever the need to grapple with his work in full critical seriousness.”
In the following review, Hossain discusses how the stories in The Burnt Ones mirror themes in White's novels and act as commentary on Australian society and the human condition.
In the following review, Welty discusses how the six short stories in The Cockatoos have similar themes involving characters who “come to a point of discovery” by confronting their problems.
In the following excerpt, Kiernan observes that The Burnt Ones is marked by abrupt contrasts in setting, mode, and tone among the stories in the collection.
In the following essay, Taylor discusses the shortcomings and the success of White's short stories in The Burnt Ones, maintaining that the stories are “fine, penetrating, courageous and illuminating in their economy.”
In the following review, Heseltine asserts that The Burnt Ones is “an essentially uneven book,” but that through the unevenness “shines one of our great creative spirits.”
Patrick White's chief interest throughout his novels has been on 'burnt ones', emotionally damaged people who lead a lonely existence without a lifeline to other lives. He is reluctant to portray his burnt ones as totally destroyed, but seeks to find for them a compensating value that might give their life some significance. Again and again, he portrays the force that supplements or transforms their blighted personal life as a richer life within the imagination. Those who do not or cann...
In the following review, originally published in Antipodes: A Journal of Australian Literature in 1988, Bliss maintains that the stories in Three Uneasy Pieces “lack the convincing density and scope of the major novels and even of much of White's short fiction.”
In the following excerpt, Björksten states that the short story is “not Patrick White's best medium of expression” during his discussion of The Burnt Ones.
In his unfavorable review of The Burnt Ones, Kiely maintains that the “exceedingly gifted writer may be dabbling in the wrong form” by penning short stories.
In this negative review of The Burnt Ones, Stilwell sharply criticizes the style of White's writing, arguing that many reviewers have overpraised his writing talent and accomplishments.
In the following negative assessment of White's fiction, Frank deems White's short stories “disappointing,” arguing that while they exhibit a “verbal richness” and “psychological acumen,” they feature characters who never seem real and plots that “verge on melodrama.”
In the following excerpt, Kiernan shows that the short stories in The Cockatoos mimic the “satiric charicature” and the “poetic intensity” of White's novel Riders in the Chariot as well as the author's work during the 1960s.
I'm not so sure that Patrick White, whom I used to admire, has sufficient negative capability in his makeup to submit his intimations to much of a battering by fact. These heretical thoughts were first suggested by a re-reading of The Aunt's Story some years ago—reputedly the author's favourite amongst his own novels. I came to the conclusion then that the vision White set over against grubby human duplicity was altogether too nebulous and undernourished, and The Twyborn Affair d...
In the following mixed review of Three Uneasy Pieces, Enright contends that while there are “brilliant passages” throughout the collection, the “book's chief uneasiness lies in the reader's fear of having missed the point.”
Patrick White is a novelist who degrades his characters and disconcerts his readers. He mercilessly probes, picks, peers, sniffs at his creations, who ignominiously writhe while we squirm. One routine debasement he inflicts on them is food; the unappetizing digestive ordeal is an expression of the existential ordeal all endure in White's seamy world…. Instead of fulfillment, they feel discomfort after feeding and they fart. Imprisoned in flesh, White's characters voraciously seek a spir...
Perhaps the most baffling feature of Patrick White's awe-inspiring oeuvre is its persistent reliance on anomaly and paradox to define reality. It is no news that "things are seldom what they seem." But White is saying more: Precisely through their disguises shall we come to know them, and they, themselves. Where surfaces blur, the result is not so much confusion as illumination. The Twyborn Affair … is an extraordinary novel of quest, an odyssey through place, time and especially...
In the following laudatory review of Three Uneasy Pieces, Sage praises White's short story collection, calling it “a marvelously cunning raid on the inarticulate.”
