Disasters in Indonesia are an existential threat and also comprise a constant motif in contemporary Indonesian literature in particular relating to natural disasters such as earthquakes, flooding or specific natural disasters such as the 2004 tsunami which struck Aceh. However, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, short stories have responded to a new and persistent disaster. This paper explores the evolution of Indonesian short stories about the representation of people’s responses to disasters over the last 30 years. It seeks to answer whether short stories have changed in terms of how they represent man’s responses to disasters in this period. The paper draws on the theory of narratology to link the event of the disaster to people’s reactions. It analyzes eight stories, four pre-covid and four post-covid. This paper concludes that in pre-covid literature reactions relate to different classes and religious conviction responding to a disaster that is occurring or has finished. Reactions include helping others, rejecting help, survivor guilt, shock, feelings of helplessness and grief. The COVID stories also represent the psychological impacts of the disasters but in contrast there is the challenge of coping with loneliness. There are also the intersectional impacts of COVID-19 coupled with man-made flooding causing greater damage to the economy of remote villages. In the COVID-19 stories the disaster is not over, and while there can be found a sense of normalcy returning there is also a long-term anxiety about COVID-19 mutations.

Keyword: COVID-19, Indonesian Literature