"Desperate Humanism: Saadat Hasan Manto's Short Stories and Sketches about Partition"

Brevity understood both as reading time but also as the convergence between the time of action and the time of narration is certainly one of the peculiarities of the short story. In Saadat Hasan Manto, briefness is a very specific stylistic and expressive trait. He was not only a quick writer, able to complete his stories frequently in just one sitting, he was also a master of conciseness. Manto translated his ethical attitude towards the tragic matter of his narration into a praxis of pursued succinctness. For him: removing reference, denying identification and stripping his texts to the bare bones was not simply his personal way of experimenting with the modernist aesthetics, it was a determined tactic to convey a sense of general moral unease and a sort of frozen discomfort.