Gently into the Night

I have been reading a volume of Dylan Thomas--not his poetry, his...what should these things be called?  The title of the book I have is The Collected Stories.  But the word "Stories," makes one think of mundane things like, well, a plot.  These "stories" have no plot--well, no discernible plot.  They are curiosities. 

Eliot once remarked about one of his poems (Sweeney among the Nightingales) that he was simply aiming to create a mood.  I think that is what Thomas was aiming for in these Stories--they convey a mood, they are written with some poetic flair, but ultimately, few of them have a beginning a middle or an end--they are just there.

The closest thing to a plot is "Adventures in the Skin Trade," which the unaware reader (like me) starts reading and sees the footnote after the title saying it is a collection of three short stories published under that title.  Then suddenly the character from the first short story shows up in the second one, and the reader thinks, "Wow!  A narrative flow."  The drama builds heading into the third short story, and then suddenly the whole thing just ends.  Puzzled, the unsuspecting reader with the aid of the editor's introduction discovers this is simply the first three chapters of a novel that Thomas never finished because of  his untimely demise.

Most of the rest of his stories do not have the narrative flow of this incomplete novel.  Most of them just start somewhere, wander all over the place, and then end.

While reading them, I got to wondering about how one composes such a thing, and then I thought, "why not try?," and then I thought, "why not start the review of this book with an example of an attempt to write something that looks like a story, but really isn't?"  So I tried.  I have no idea what yesterday's post is all about.  But, I am sure there is some meaning in there somewhere--I'll just leave it to the reader to figure out.  I think Thomas would approve of that idea.