SOURCE: "The Stories II: Narrative Modes," in The Short Narratives of E. M. Forster, St. Martin's Press, 1988, pp. 48-63.

In this excerpt, Herz discusses the doubleness of Forster's short fiction as revealed in the disjunctive relationship between narrative strategies and narrative voice .

Forster's stories are complex fictions whose significance and accomplishment are far from exhausted by identifying their mythic materials. Indeed, it is precisely because they are strong fictions and not, as they have too often been considered, juvenilia or whimsical exercises in turn-of-the-century Hellenism, that they can sustain an inquiry directed at identifying their multiple levels of meaning and the strategies invented to present (or conceal) these meanings. In a Forsterian narrative several stories are proceeding simultaneously—that is, one set of words may 'tell' several stories, or, alternatively, the story may exist apart from the words that tell it. Nearly all the stories, moreover, have some...