Chapter 7

Doing and teaching

This chapter explores the continuity between Bill Nash’s academic work on style and stylistics and his fiction writing. In both forms, Nash aimed to instruct and entertain, and saw that to achieve those ends one had to be seriously playful and use a creative imagination. The chapter focusses specifically on the stylistic means by which Nash closes his short novel, Kettle of Roses, a novel that takes the form of eighteen expansive letters from Edna Pugh to a childhood friend, reporting the recent developments in Edna’s life. There seems no decisive basis in plot or logic for the letters to leave off where they do, so arguably Nash is faced with a problem: how to bring the novel to a satisfying close. The author shows how stylistic analysis of a paragraph in the final letter highlights the presence of many of the features he has called High Emotional Involvement (HEI) narration, a style of narration that creates a more intense engagement, emotionally and ethically, in the story situation than is encountered elsewhere in the narrative. The author has found HEI narration used near the close of many modern short stories, where it seems to be used in part to make the imminent ending satisfying and acceptable to the reader. It serves a similar function in Kettle of Roses.