Schwartz's fictional aims are suggested in his criticism of other fiction writers. This fictional "credo" is clearest in "John Dos Passos and the Whole Truth," a review of U.S.A. which goes beyond its topical subject to make a general statement about the nature of fiction….

This "whole truth" and "imagination" necessary for great literature enter fiction through a "multiscient individual," "the individual of the fullest intelligence and sensibility," who "in some one of many quite different fashions transcends the situation and the subject."…

What distinguishes The World is a Wedding from social history, what makes it meaningful today almost thirty years since its publication in 1948, is this transcendent "whole truth." Schwartz's fiction embodies this multiscient vision … especially in style and language.

Schwartz manipulates language to bracket his stories in irony and to create a distance between the narrative voice and the stories themselves. It is in this tone and distance that the multiscient vision comes into play. (p. 260)

The title of the story I shall explore in some detail, "The World is a Wedding," suggests Schwartz's method, for it derives from conversation within the fiction. This is particularly fitting because Schwartz's stories are supremely cerebral, verbal pieces whose focus is thought—rembrance, analysis, verbal evocation—and the sharing and comparing of thought—conversation. They are highly internalized both in location (inside apartments) and in characterization. With minimal description of landscape or of the physical traits of characters, the fiction relies on internal analysis and conversation for revelation. To a large extent the events themselves have little significance except as their meanings are fully analyzed by the characters; the movement of the mind is the highest form of action….

Section one [of the story's ten sections] displays the multiscience in both the complex style and in the ideas and beliefs which give direction to the work. The disarming first paragraph—"In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself" … sets the tone immediately, for it must be taken on two levels which contradict each other but do not cancel each other out. The ideas are meant seriously; they suggest Schwartz's tortured sense of time and the perils of consciousness. (p. 261)

Through an artful combination of narrative summary (condensation and generalization) and the full embodiment of a few telling scenes, Schwartz suggests both the inevitable, generally unnoticed movement of time and a sense of timelessness, the revelation of a central moment: he achieves the building sense of development of the novel and the illuminating moment of the short story.

The layers of irony pile up dizzily as the narrator—and characters—peruse the events and other characters from every angle. It is as if the world were a prismatic sphere turned endlessly in the hands of some fascinated Supreme Intelligence. (p. 262)

Schwartz's somersaults of dialectic reach a climax at the final party of the circle [of friends, the characters of the story,] which is breaking up because Rudyard finally accepts a job as a drama teacher outside New York City. Bitter that she has been used by Rudyard and his friends, and particularly that she is still unmarried, Laura tells a distorted version of a Kafka story and compares herself to a cow eaten alive by a hunter and his horse (Rudyard and the circle). Trying to comfort her, Jacob explains "'all of us consume each other,'" and insists that the world is a wedding which means that "'the world is a wedding of God and Nature.'"… He says that Breugel's painting "The Peasant Wedding" exemplifies this notion: "'If you look at it long enough, you will see all the parts that anyone and everyone can have.'"… At this wedding "'if no one can play every part, yet everyone can come to the party … and anyone who does not know that he is at a wedding feast just does not know what is in front of him.'"… (p. 263)

[Beyond] the dialectic between Laura's conscience or consciousness and Jacob's idea of the joy of life is Schwartz's ultimate irony: the fact that Laura's speech is more fitting for Jacob and vice versa. Here is a clear example of the multiscient function of ironic distance. Despite her negative speech, it is Laura who is engaged in the world, who plays a part at the wedding…. In contrast, the idealist Jacob is the true renouncer, the one who stands aside and watches without participating. Despite his life-praising words, he embodies conscience, and consciousness. (pp. 263-64)

This special kind of ironic tension between the "truths" of the characters and their own personalities is evident throughout….

Arguing against a critic who declared that life was too various and vast to be brought as a whole within the compass of a novel, Schwartz once explained that "merely the whole truth about a part of life will suffice—and moreover the part can stand for the whole, the symbol being the very essence of literature."… In the short fiction of his first collection, The World is a Wedding, Schwartz has given us this whole truth about a part of life—and that is why his "social history" of the Jewish middle class in New York during the depression years is so much more than that. (p. 264)