If you know how to write, however, you will get along faster and is another, more profound value to writing. We cre¬ate ourselves by words. Before we are businesspeople or law¬yers or engineers or teachers, we are human beings. | For more material and information please visit 374 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION Akrigg states his point in the opening paragraph Raleigh died heroically. In the story itself Raleigh s own words and actions carry that theme. The writer wisely lets them speak for themselves. In effective narrative you must render scenes as you want readers to see them and not labor overlong on telling them why your story is significant. If you create real characters and action readers will gather the meaning. It is not even necessary to state the point at the beginning or end of the story though sometimes as in the example by Akrigg it is desirable . Edmund Wilson for instance does not tell us what the story of Peter Romano and Mr. Copace means it is clear enough. Similarly the following brief narrative by Ernest Hemingway which we saw earlier as an example of understatement leaves its meaning for readers to infer They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him down stairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees. Hemingway s story exemplifies realistic meaning. For while one can read philosophical significance into the horrifying episode there is no evidence that Hemingway intends us to jump to any philosophy. This he implies is simply the way things are the story is its own meaning. The narrative also exemplifies objective presentation. It concentrates on the surface of events on what can be .
