The main characteristics of O. Henry's writing style

 

O'Henry is honored as "a father of modern American short story" for his major contribution into the development of this ganre [40]. Let us consider the main stylistic characteristics that made him one of the world's renowned short story writers:

1) A twist ending or surprise ending. His stories are characterized by extreme unpredictability. Most of them have unexpected conclusion or climax which often causes the audience to reevaluate the narrative or characters.

This trend has drawn attention of several critics:

Hyder E. Rollins said "The conclusion is an enigma" [42].

Eugene Current-Garsia said that "the most obvious technical manifestation of O. Henry's delight in the unexpected is in his famous surprise endings" [21].

O'Henry has the reader under the suspense until the last sentence. Figuratively speaking, the surprise ending was the trick that O'Henry made his special trade-mark.

This takes roots in the writer's world view. O'Henry had an idea that life is a surprise, that the unexpected continually happens. This is how Rollins commented on this idea: "He is then, a pure romanticist who strives earnestly for realistic effects" [42].

Admittedly, it is also true that he saw life always in episodic form and was incapable of longer unified work or any philosophic generalization of his fantastic outlook. His characters, plain simple people, and his plots, depending often on the surprise coding, have little diversification, but he was skilled at ringing the changes, on a few themes.

2) Attention to details combined with minimalism. O'Henry achieves compression by exercising a rigid selectivity. He chooses the details and incidents that contribute most to the meaning he is after; he omits those whose usefulness is minimal. As far as possible he chooses details that are multi-valued. A detail that expresses character at the same time it advances the plot is more useful than a detail that does only one or the other.

3) Heavy use of different kinds of humor (irony, satire). With the help of satire and humor O'Henry exposes some important problems of American reality. Rollins said that "Just as his plots and his characters are humorous in concentration and in treatment, so the most striking trait of O'Henry as a stylist is humor".

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, in which there is a sharp incongruity that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words.

Let's consider a juicy example of irony found in the story "The Cop and The Anthem". Here the author intends to show the stupidity of a man by using irony. Soapy the main character wants to give his freedom instead of Prison: “Three months in the prison on Blackwell’s Island was what he wanted. Three months of food every day and a bed every night, three months safe from the cold north wind and safe from cops. This seemed to Soapy the most desirable thing in the world”.

4) The use of allusions. An example of O'Henry's artistry with words can be seen in his many literary allusions, especially toward Shakespearean plays and the ancient classics [28].

A name of one of the stories «We are short, and Art is long» is an alteration of a famous Latin proverb «vita brevis, ars longa».

He also quotes Spencer and others changing the meaning of their words to distort the meaning of the text.

5) The use of slang words. Lexical structure of O' Henry’s novels includes common literary, conversational and low colloquial expressions and slang.

There is no doubt that the presence of slang makes O' Henry more favorable to the general public, because the public is drawn to a writer who turns down academic facts of speech [35].

Some of the examples are: a crack on a head, nix cum rous, to blow in one's money, to snap one's fingers.

His use of conversation, often humorous or slangy and sometimes exaggerated very typical. From his own life he drew the material for his accounts of the every day people, the hard-luck souls that he describes with a warmth of human understanding and sympathy.

6) Puns & wordplay. Puns and other plays on words are signatures of O. Henry's fiction. His short stories are well known for their wit and wordplay. Forms of wit include the quip and repartee. Word play represents a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work. Puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names are common examples of word play in O'Henry's literary works [35].

A clever employment of wordplay is observed in the title «The Hand That Riles the World», which instantly brings to mind the expression “rules the world”.

In general, O'Henry’s language is rather simple but the usage of stylistic devices helps him create additional emotion coloring.

Interestingly enough, some of the critics point out that there is a distinct pattern

applied to most of the writer's short stories.

According to critic Martin Seymore-Smith [42], the basic pattern is this: "...a beginning calculated to arouse curiosity and provoke a guess; a demonstration that this... guess is wrong; a surprise ending with the famous ingenious "twist".