American laconic: Nescience and realism in Richard Ford’s ‘Optimists’

The short stories of Richard Ford are examples of how the short form and minimalist prose mimic the unhealthy limitedness of human knowledge. Ford himself claims it is fiction’s duty to recreate the condition of not knowing and that people are the mysterious sum of their actions. Using Ford’s story ‘Optimists’, and considering the tension between empirical and Platonic epistemologies, minimalist short fiction is considered for its portrayal of human knowledge as limited and imperfect. As such, the short story form is uncannily apt at achieving narrative realism interested in the human condition of not knowing or nescience.