Endings and beginnings: reading Clark Blaise's 'A Fish Like a Buzzard'

This essay examines the highly nuanced and highly powerful ways Clark Blaise revisited and reinvented classic conventions of the modern short story in his first published story, 'A Fish Like a Buzzard', a story that, forty years later, Blaise would choose to open (metafictively, this essay argues) the first volume, Southern Stories, of his four-part Selected Stories (2000-2006). Particular attention is given to Blaise's treatment of successive beginnings and endings in this three-part story, to his sense of how stories' endings, like the writing of this story for him, can and must involve looking backward, but also, and more importantly, looking forward. Contexts for the analysis provided in this essay include Clark Blaise's key theoretical essay 'How Stories Mean', from his Selected Essays (2008), along with individual stories by James Joyce, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor