The World’s Shortest Novel?: Snoopy’s “It was a Dark and Stormy Night”

Is a novel defined by its length or by a certain approach? According to Wikipedia, Snoopy’s It was a Dark and Stormy Night is a novel because of certain perspective on life, an attempt to present a “totality of life.” It qualifies as metafiction, because it exposes conventions of the novel, namely an epic treatment of life.

From the Wikipedia article on the novel: Snoopy’s novel It Was A Dark And Stormy Night which followed the 1965 cartoon in 1971 proves that the requirement of length is actually secondary to the requirement of a certain perspective on life – which Snoopy can easily offer in 214 words:

Snoopy‘s Novel, 12 July 1965

Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
The intern frowned.
“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

The text is shorter than most short stories yet definitely a novel thanks to the author’s attempts to risk what Lukács had seen as the “Great epic’s” potential to “give form to the extensive totality of life.” The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the “totality of life”. The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation.

Written by ronosaurus

March 14th, 2010 at 11:48 am

Posted in Modern Meta

Tagged with It was a dark and stormy night, metafiction, novel, peanuts, Snoopy, totality of life

7 Responses to 'The World’s Shortest Novel?: Snoopy’s “It was a Dark and Stormy Night”'

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First Novel by Dan

Vol. 1
Innocent bliss transforms over time to sadness that the frog needed to be let go so that it could be free. New knowledge joys and heartaches develop on the baseball field, in school, and at church as the complex evolves in an ignorant world. Dedication solidifies in the streets and home of Argentina.

Vol. 2
Immense joy and excitement comes in the joining of two lives, forever. That joy evolves to immeasurable joy and at times incalculable pain. It starts again the cycle of new adventures with others related to frogs, baseball, school, church, marriage, and birth but this time from a distance.

Vol. 3.
There is an effort to try to reconnect with what was lost. Seeking to reach out but finding barriers and difficulties. This results in finding a simple joy in writing a Novel perhaps shorter than the shortest.

Dan

15 Mar 10 at 7:37 pm
Wow! What a great novel, Dan!

ronosaurus

16 Mar 10 at 12:11 am
Here’s a comment. Great advice =) Thanks

mulch Wilmington De

5 Apr 10 at 9:30 am
It’s a metacomment!

ronosaurus

5 Apr 10 at 8:40 pm
[...] the posts I have already mentioned several times, I will refer you to the previous paragraphs. In The World’s Shortest Novel? Snoopy’s It was a Dark and Stormy Night I look at how this very brief piece of fiction is in fact a novel because it succeeds at the [...]

The Conventions of Unconventionality: An Overview of Metafiction | Once I Metablog on Metafiction

29 May 10 at 9:51 am
But what about the King?

Richard

1 Jul 11 at 11:28 am
*Throws Typewriter at Richard’s Head*

Snoopy

17 Nov 11 at 8:43 pm