Prose Fiction: The Novel and Short Story

Prose fiction is imaginative narrative written in ordinary sentences and paragraphs rather than in verse. In the IB Language and Literature course, the two dominant prose forms are the novel and the short story. Both invent characters and events, but they differ in scale, pacing, and the demands they place on a reader. Learning to read them as text types means noticing not only what happens but how the telling shapes meaning.

The novel: breadth and development

A novel is a long fictional narrative, usually tens of thousands of words, that develops characters and situations over an extended span. Its length gives it room for subplots, gradual change, and a fully imagined world. A novel can follow a protagonist across years, weave together several storylines, and pause for reflection or desc