When read as a group there is a tension created between the ideas of the individual stories, often showing changes that have occurred over time or highlighting the conflict between two opposing concepts or thoughts.
[4] Scholars have pointed out that there is a wide range of possibilities that fall between simple collections and novels in their most-commonly understood form.
[9] J. Gerald Kennedy describes the proliferation of the genre in the twentieth century, attributing it in part to the desire "to renounce the organizing authority of an omniscient narrator, asserting instead a variety of voices or perspectives reflective of the radical subjectivity of modern experience.
Kennedy finds this proliferation in keeping with modernism and its use of fragmentation, juxtaposition and simultaneism to reflect the "multiplicity" that he believed to characterize that century.
These organising principles pertain to their theory of the composite novel as a short story collection where the focus lies on the coherent whole.