THE DINOSAUR
 Bina Gupta has made a challenging proposition to Sulekha bloggers to write a poem or story of 55 words containing mixed emotions. When I saw that theme, I was reminded of one of the smallest (and one of the best) stories in literature titled ‘The Dinosaur’ by the great Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who was well-known for his terse minimalist style of writing like that of Hemingway. The story has just nine words:
‘When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there’

A perfect story. Unbeatable power of persuasion, remarkable concision, perfect drama, color, suggestiveness, and clarity. A real minimalist narrative gem. ‘The Dinosaur’ is an interesting piece of writing because its simplicity makes it so complex. Monterroso leaves this text in suspense and offers to the reader an opportunity to become co-fabulator here. This enigmatic work has given rise to numerous doctoral theses.
In the book ‘Letters to a young Novelist’, the great Peruvian Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa discusses this story from the points of view of -the narrator, space, time and Level of reality. I have summarized it below.
The narration in ‘The Dinosaur’ is made in the past tense. So the narrator is situated in the future, narrating something that happened-when? In the near or middle past from the narrator’s future point of view? In the middle past. How do we know that the narrator is situated in the near or middle past in relation to the time of the narrator? Because between those two times there is an unbridgeable abyss, a gap, a barrier that abolishes all link or continuity between the two (The comma). This is the determining characteristic of the tense the narrator employs: The action is confined to a closed- off past, split from the time the narrator inhabits. The action of ‘Dinosaur’ takes place, therefore, in a middle past.
What is the point of view in terms of level of reality in this story? The narrative is situated in the plane of the fantastic, since in the real world you and I inhabit, it is improbable that prehistoric animals that appeared in our dreams–or in our nightmares–would turn up as an objective reality, and that we should encounter them in the flesh at the foot of our beds when we opened our eyes. It’s clear, then, that the level of reality of the narrative is an imaginary or fantastic reality. Is the narrator (omniscient and impersonal) situated on the same plane? We could venture to say that he is not, that he establishes himself instead on a real or realist plane–in other words, one that is essentially opposite and contrary to that of the narrative. How do we know this? By the tiniest but most unmistakable of indications, a signal or hint that the careful narrator gives the reader as he tells his pared-down tale: the adverb, ‘still’. The word doesn’t just define an objective temporal circumstance, indicating a miraculous occurrence (the passage of the dinosaur from a dreamworld to objective reality). It is also a call to attention, a display of surprise or astonishment at the remarkable event. Monterroso’s still is flanked by invisible exclamation points and implicitly urges us to be surprised by the amazing thing that has happened. (“Notice, all of you, what is going on: the dinosaur is still there, when it’s obvious that it shouldn’t be, since in true reality things like this don’t happen; they are only possible in a fantastic reality.”) This is how we know the narrator is narrating from an objective reality; if he weren’t, he wouldn’t induce us through the knowing use of an amphibious adverb (still ) to take note of the transition of the dinosaur from dream to life, from the imaginary to the tangible.
The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes rightly remarked the following about Monterroso – ‘He is one of the cleanest, most intelligent, transparent and smiling authors in the Spanish language’.
No wonder, ‘The Dinosaur’ became such a hit in Latin American literary history.