"A Grain of Mustard Seed" and Other Short Stories Literary Elements

Short story/fiction

Various. “A Grain of Mustard Seed”: Lahore, India. “The Golden Girl”: aboard a ship sailing from Liverpool to Bombay which sinks on the way. “A Light on the Road to Woodstock”: England in 1120, during the reign of Henry I.

Various. “My Friend, the Enemy” and “Guide to Doom” both features a first-person point of view written from the perspective of someone directly addressing another person. “The Ultimate Romeo and Juliet” features a first-person point of view, but constantly switches back and forth between the singular and plural perspective.

Various. “I am a Seagull” is dependent upon creating a tone of desperation and a mood of gothic suspense. “The Golden Girl” grows increasing ironic in tone after establishing a mood of dread.

Most memorable protagonist: Mahdar Iqbal, “A Grain of Mustard Seed.” Most memorable antagonist: Eileen Willard, “The Man who Met Himself”

“The Golden Girl” is particularly interesting because it features a number of conflicts all working together at once to create tragedy. The title faces a conflict between greed and survival, between truth and deception, between honesty and confession of a crime, between her own self-interest and more powerful and dangerous vested interests, and—ultimately—between the weight of gold and the physics of buoyancy.

“The Man Who Met Himself” reaches its dramatic as a result of the title character literally meeting himself. In confessing to murdering his wife, he makes the shocking and seemingly impossible revelation that while climbing the stairs to her room with a gun in his hand, he saw himself coming down the stairs holding the same gun. The story climaxes with the first-person narrator solving this existential riddle of how a man not born with a twin brother could possibly see himself in the same place at the same time doing the exact opposite. Hint: it doesn’t involve smoke.

“There was a set of Meissen china, white and gold filigree, the prettiest you ever saw – she talked about it for months after. And a little inlaid ivory cabinet and a full-length Venetian mirror in a black glass frame. When she knew they were all to be sold she almost fell ill with longing for them.” foreshadows the stunning revelation that is the climax of “The Man Who Met Himself.”

“The Golden Girl”: “And the way she thanked me, I’d have jumped overboard for her” is a classic example of explicitly giving away how the story ends but by disguising it through understatement.

The title “A Grain of Mustard Seed” alludes to a parable told by Jesus.

“I am a Seagull” is the rare story of the author’s in which the entire narrative is wholly dependent upon creating atmosphere through imagery: “It was raining, too, in a wild downpour, the day I met Lucy; even the air had become lashing water, and as I went up the cliff-path there was above me an inverted cauldron of cloud, boiling, too, and casting up spinning, blown, crumpled debris of gulls. They screamed through the howl of the wind, like demons. Their voices seemed to me to hold the whole of desolation, but the whole of joy, too.”

“My Friend, the Enemy” features a paradox as its title.

“The Ultimate Romeo and Juliet” begins with an example of parallel construction: “All we wanted was a world. A world to take the place of the one we’d been busy making untenable for generations before we realized how far the process had gone, and that it couldn’t be reversed. A world with a breathable atmosphere, with a climate we could adapt to, if we couldn’t adapt it to ourselves, with water and vegetation, and preferably fauna not too far removed from what we knew on earth. Just an ordinary world.”

The Major in “The Purple Children” turns the flag of the enemy from a metonymic representative of everything about them he considers villainous almost into a literal nemesis to be captured and killed: “And above, afloat upon the restless wind, the expected flag, an enemy that could not be imprisoned or exiled or killed, and certainly could never be silenced.”

Grim Fairy Tale”: “The house waited for me, quiescent, biding its time.”