‘The reality I speak of here…’ – A Long Analysis of Woody Allen’s Short Fiction

“The reality I speak of here is the same one Hobbes described, but a little smaller”, writes Woody Allen between parentheses in “My Philosophy”, a text first published in The New Yorker, in the early years of his collaboration with the magazine. This sentence, through its insertion in a mock-philosophical essay presenting itself as a writer’s manifesto and through its explanatory potential marked by the brackets, invites an extrapolative reading that can encompass Woody Allen’s entire prose work. Therefore, the case can be made that the reality of Allen’s short fiction presents the world as bodies in motion governed by the fear-desire principle, the soul as mortal, the individual caught in theological conundrums and struggling in a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, and short” – of course, on a smaller scale, ironically deflated by self-mockery and metafictional gestures.