Dinner Along the Amazon Literary Elements

Short story collection/literary fiction

Various. “Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye” is set in the fictional Long Island area hamlet of Cheeverland, loosely based upon the setting of much of the short fiction of John Cheever.

Various. “About Effie” is narrated in the first-person perspective with the narrator directly addressing the reader as “you.” A third-person narrator relates “The Book of Pins” with sections separated by specific times of the day.

A dark mood lingers over many of the stories, but this negatively-charged atmosphere is made less tangibly dramatic by a lighter tone. The overall emotional tenor is a kind of plaintive paranoia.

Varies according to individual stories, but most are slightly upper middle class characters unified by a commonality of struggles with self-identity and a tendency toward isolation and alienation.

The conflicts in these stories are domestic in nature, pitting family members against other, neighbor versus neighbor, and individual against themselves. The title of one of these stories about domestic battles is one that could appropriately have been adopted as the title of the entire collection: “War”

One key shared characteristic of the stories in this collection is that they do not move inexorably toward a climax in the typical sense. The climax of a story is usually the high point of action rising to a fever pitch as a result of tension and conflict, but almost all these stories instead move on a trajectory of lowered tension and conflict, ending in a more contemplative and open-ended anticlimax.

The opening paragraph of “The Book of Pins” foreshadows the ending. The closing paragraph is identical to the opening with the exception of the omission of sentence constructed of just two words.

A defining characteristic of Findley’s short fiction is his understated conclusions. The title story is also the final story in the collection and thus the final sentence of the book reads simply “Far in the Amazon a region, a pin dropped.”

“Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye” is filled with allusions to characters from the stories of John Cheever.

“Losers, Finders, Strangers at the Door” opens with a fragment of imagery that is openly suggestive enough to act as a sort of decoding key which opens the path to understanding all of Findley’s stories and his body of a work as a whole: “…there are no beginnings, not even to stories. There are only places where you make an entrance into some else’s life and either stay or turn and go away.”

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“And she flung the book to the street. And she waited. And she waited. And she waited.”

Several stories in the collection make references to “The War” in ways which makes it a metonym utilized to encompass the comprehensive effects of World War II both as it applies to actual battle and to the consequences on the homefront.

“Kileys' dog is always looking for its owner; and its name…It has no name and is simply known as `Kileys' Dog.’ This does not suit the dog at all, who wants a proper name like any other dog.”