While even the best literary critics have been unable to define adequately the short story, novella, and novel, they generally agree about placing individual works within a genre and acknowledge a common ground for certain characteristics. No one was seriously misled when Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea was transplanted from its rather cramped space in Life magazine to the fullness of a Scribners' edition which had the most generous margins in recent book publishing. Moreover, an examination of the effect of Hemingway's work clearly reveals that, for all its prolixity, it is no more than a short story. In the same way, Mann's Death in Venice, Flaubert's A Simple Heart, and Tolstoy's The Death of Iván Ilých are easily recognizable as novellas. Despite their unity, these works have thematic development, character analyses, and varied detail that take them beyond the limits of the short story, and yet their unity is of a kind far too specific for the novel.

The question of genre, however insoluble, is worthy of consideration, for it frequently leads to an understanding of the reasons for success or failure in a particular work. There are things that a short story should not attempt to do. When it seeks, for example, to go outside the limits of its primary incidents, it becomes flaccid and dissipates its necessary impact. By the same token, the novella that emphasizes its plot and so tries to gain its effect through these surface narrative devices concludes in superficiality.

Perhaps nowhere are the distinctions between the short story and novella to be better drawn than in the work of Schnitzler which appeared in an American translation called Viennese Novelettes. Through the successes and failures of five stories—Daybreak (Spiel im Morgengrauen), Fräulein Else, Rhapsody [Rhapsody: A Dream Novel] (Traumnovelle), Beatrice (Frau Beate), and “None but the Brave” (“Leutnant Gustl”)—the effects of appropriate genres may be traced. Where Schnitzler stays within the framework of a genre, the result is rewarding; where he strays—generally for the sake of fashionable appeal—he loses the effectiveness of his art. Yet there is as much to be learned from the one as from the other.

Indeed, what the opening story teaches comes through its ultimate failure. Because Schnitzler is undecided about its genre, Daybreak combines two narrative techniques and fails to satisfy with either. The pace is leisurely, too leisurely for the short story form although appropriate enough for the novella. But by plunging into his action, Schnitzler, at first, gives the impression that he is writing a short story. This illusion is maintained in Lieutenant Kasda's initial comments on the absurdity of the erstwhile Lieutenant Bogner's conduct in permitting himself to be destroyed by his gambling impulse. Kasda's statement and its tone are a clear foreshadowing of his own experience, and were the narrative to end with Kasda's defeat at the card table, it would generally meet that requirement of the short form which calls for one major change of circumstance.

Yet everything else in Schnitzler's method along the way indicates that he is attempting something beyond the perfunctory well-made narrative. In his treatment of the gambling episode, Schnitzler uses details and devices that go to extremes too bulky for the short story. The gradual development of Kasda's circumstances, the interplay of fate and character that leads him to his debacle, and the long side-glances at the affairs of others belong to the technique of the novella. Even after the gambling loss, Schnitzler covers territory that lies outside the realm of the short story. Indeed, were he determined to stay within those bounds, the later material (such as Kasda's affair with his uncle's wife, the recollection of their earlier liaison, and the uncle's decline in fortune) would be anticlimactic. Moreover, it is apparent from Schnitzler's interest in characterization—best expressed in the insights into Kasda's thoughts during the card game—that the author is essaying more than can properly be accomplished in the short story.

However, Schnitzler, who is at his best when he depreciates external action, here depends too much on the devices of plot to be successful in the longer form. The tricks of fate, particularly at the conclusion when Kasda's uncle arrives too late to save him from suicide and momentarily has his suspicions aroused about his nephew's last night with his wife, belong to the tradition of the De Maupassant tale with its ironic if somewhat unbelievable twist. The fact, too, that Kasda succeeds in his initial purpose to save Bogner from prosecution for fraud and yet is destroyed himself in the effort has the grim humor of an O. Henry story. Were any of these the termination of a shorter narrative, it would no doubt be effective, but the necessary vigor is lost as Schnitzler covers a larger compass of ground. To be sure, there is much that is admirable in Daybreak, especially the realism of Kasda's desperation at the card table, but narrative technique that is inappropriate to content minimizes the effectiveness of any work of art.

The art comes close to its utmost satisfaction, however, in Schnitzler's second story in the collection. Like Lieutenant Kasda, the heroine of Fräulein Else is destroyed in saving someone else—in this instance, her father—from the consequences of improvident gambling. She must approach the lecherous old man Dorsday to attempt a loan that will keep her parent from prison and her family from disgrace. Throughout the story, Schnitzler is concerned, as he was in Daybreak, with the social hypocrisies, the false codes of honor, and the dualities of character. Yet Fräulein Else is a triumph of art because it adapts form to content as Daybreak did not.

External action in itself is truly of little consequence to Schnitzler here. Its function is to provide the surface tensions against which the normal and confused sexuality of young Else's development is distorted and perverted into the neurotic hysterical behavior that terminates in her suicide. Given the restrictions of the short story form, the necessary repetition of detail and the subtleties of distinction at various stages would clutter the narrative. In the larger area of the novella, they perform a rhythmical function that provides depth and unity to the work. It is a poetic device applied naturally enough to a prose work that bears a close resemblance to the dramatic monologue. As details are repeated, they recall their former use, and yet their slight alterations suggest a progression in the character's point of view. Upon Else's first meeting with Dorsday before her own fate is linked to him, she speaks objectively of his calves' eyes, but when she seeks him out for help, it becomes, “What calves' eyes he is making at me!” What has happened between the two occasions—Dorsday's being proposed as the man who can save her father—has turned the quite innocent comment into a personal appraisal. In the same way, Else's observations of Paul, Cissy, her aunt, father, mother, and brother undergo a subtle transition as her circumstances change. For Schnitzler in Fräulein Else that fact rather than the plot development is important.

Gone is the trick ending, which, if Schnitzler had been writing the well-made short story, would have offered Else's view of those around her as being ironically inaccurate. Instead, the affair that she has suspected between her cousin Paul and Cissy is verified before her apparently senseless form, and the callousness that she has instinctively felt in others is demonstrated at her very deathbed.

While the bizarre events in the surface narrative of Rhapsody are intriguing and carry their own suspense, Schnitzler in this third story is employing them as a device for examining the depths of his characters. To be sure, there is more of the quality of the facile short story in Rhapsody than in Fräulein Else, and its conclusion—the moment of revelation in the morgue—provides an epiphany that is characteristic of that genre. Nevertheless, the exploration of the boundaries between reality and illusion is less concerned with the plot resolution, typical of the short story, than it is with the functioning of a particular mind, natural material for a novella. If in Fräulein Else Schnitzler happily applied the techniques of stream-of-consciousness to his psychological case study, in Rhapsody he demonstrates that fantasy can be used for the same purpose.

Perhaps it will help to distinguish between the novella that Schnitzler has written and the material as it would have appeared in the short story. Had Rhapsody been a short story, it might have opened with the same situation that Schnitzler has used: a husband and wife reactivated in their marriage through separate flirtations at a masquerade ball. From that point on, however, the selectivity imposed on a short story writer would have limited the areas of development open to Schnitzler. The theme of jealousy, the subtle description of a double standard, the character distinctions between the married couple, all would have been jettisoned in the need to carry the single effect that is expected from the short story. Schnitzler would have been required to discard the experiences with the costumer's daughter, the frustrations with both Marianne and the prostitute, in order to concentrate on the incredible episode of the naked ladies at the mystery ball. As a matter of fact, even the irresolution of Schnitzler's conclusion would require alternation as the finish to a short story since the change that is effected is no change at all but rather the acceptance of the variety of experiences through which the character has passed. For the novella, where impact and suspense are adjuncts and not requisites, such a conclusion is appropriate; for the short story, seeking primarily an emotional response, it is not.

It is a novella that Schnitzler has written. Its burden is again a play between the surface tensions and the emotional disturbances of the hero. Schnitzler, familiar with Freud, makes use of Freudian dream techniques and symbolic devices to delineate character, to support motivation, and to explain conduct. Within the narrow confines of a short story, much of this detail would appear superfluous; in a novella it becomes as much an end in itself as a method of narration.

In order to transmute his Freudian material to art in Beatrice, the next story, Schnitzler is again compelled to make use of the novella. The narrative is composed of several stages in the development of the heroine: from the chaste widow, living in dedication to a false ideal, to a passionate fool, deceiving herself about her real desires, to a tragic figure, yielding to her incestuous drives and to death. Each step requires background, motivation, and detail. Each change supplies its own climax. While the particular kind of character unity rules out the possibility of a novel, it is too varied to be satisfied by the form of a short story, and only the middle ground of the novella will do.

Action is again less a matter of narrative than of mind, and Schnitzler displays an unusual talent for capturing the sensitivity of a feminine point of view. Whereas in Fräulein Else he presented the workings of a young girl's thought process, difficult enough in itself, here he takes on the burden of the sophistications that embroider the thinking of a mature woman. In Fräulein Else he was able to use the stream-of-consciousness technique, far more adaptable to an exposition of the mind than ordinary narrative and dramatic devices are. The problems in Beatrice, however, do not allow for the same narrative method. He cannot have Beatrice conscious of her incestuous impulses without giving the game away, but instead he must use a limited omniscience which makes clear her point of view and yet suggests to the reader what is shaping her actions, what accounts for her conduct, and what devices help her to hide the truth from herself.

Once more the leisurely pace of the novella permits him the opportunity to deal with observations that are less essential to the narrative than they are congenial to his comments on society and types of individuals. It affords him the chance to paint portraits of the wanton woman, living through her deceptions, youth in the boastfulness of its conquests, and middle age envying the opportunities of the young. To be sure, these play a role in Schnitzler's action, but they would be a handicap in the limited form of the short story, while they enhance the credibility and lend fulness to the novella.

Schnitzler's final story in the collection—“None but the Brave”—has been regarded as one of his early masterpieces, and despite the weakness of a deus ex machina conclusion, it is truly a remarkable achievement in the early development of a stream-of-consciousness technique. Yet it is important to recognize that the work is a short story rather than a novella. Not only is its length considerably less than what one expects in the latter genre, but the very psychology that molds its form provides a unity consistent with the short story rather than the novella. To be sure, there is implied comment on the military code and values—an implication strong enough to have cost Schnitzler his commission in the medical reserves—and there are suggestions of Lieutenant Gustl's emotional involvements outside the particular episode. Nevertheless, these are not developed with the kind of adequacy that would be necessary in the longer form; they are not, for example, given the same stress that they received in Fräulein Else, although the techniques of the two stories otherwise invite comparison.

What Schnitzler is attempting to show in “None but the Brave” is a particular state of mind. Were it not so, the story would be a failure. As it is, the trick ending, while common enough in the genre, is trying and is acceptable only because it is inconsequential to Schnitzler's purpose in the narrative. The entire affair of the insult from the baker is, in fact, a kind of subterfuge that the lieutenant has created to divert his mind from his impending duel with the doctor. The contemplated suicide is a mental ruse to permit an individual confronted with the uncertainties of one adventure to seek another in which he may captain his own fate by marshalling his own circumstances. The sudden death of the baker would prove ruinous to a short story were it to be the main object of the narrative; to a novella it would be altogether inappropriate because of the kind of climax it produces.

The suggestion that Schnitzler presents the lieutenant's “most intimate thoughts with all the relevant and irrelevant associations of ideas” is positively misleading. It is an attempt to describe the work as a novella, rich with the sort of detail that lends breadth to a vision of life that can be properly explored in the genre. Yet any careful reading of Schnitzler's story indicates that the details are never irrelevant. The fastening on to things that are sensuous, the attachment to earlier experiences provide a counterpoint to the present fears. Like the Blakean romantic who seizes a tree to assure himself of reality, Lieutenant Gustl conjures up those images that seem assurances against death. Whatever the seemingly rambling quality of his thoughts, they bear with a determined unity upon his particular circumstance. As such, they lend to the appropriateness of the genre that Schnitzler has chosen, and “None but the Brave” is evidence that he could master the short story, just as Beatrice attests to his skill in the novella.