The Knife Thrower and Other Stories Literary Elements

Magical realism

Various unspecified settings in the 19th and 20th century

The stories are told in first and third-person perspectives, with the most striking one being the first-person plural ("we") perspective, which aims to include the reader.

Mysterious, surreal

In many stories, there is one individual going against the expectations of a community.

One major conflict arises when Harter is caught having an affair with a married woman. He refuses to participate in a duel with the husband and is subsequently killed.

Just when Sarabee is about to open his most anticipated amusement park, it is burned down.

During the knife thrower’s performance, the imagery foreshadows physical harm. For example, the knife thrower is "bathed in blood-light,” and “there was the pale victim manacled to a wall,” which resembles a corpse.

When the knife thrower's assistant announces that "this is the final mark, the mark that can be received only once," she refers to a lethal physical injury that is to be inflicted by the artist.

The knife thrower’s assistant is compared to “a martyr on a cross” after a number of knives have been thrown at her. Alluding to the image of Jesus on the cross, this illustrates that the audience secretly wants the assistant to be harmed and to sacrifice herself for their pleasure.

In “Clair de Lune,” the narrator paints an image of an enchanted world, where he feels “bound in the dark blue spell of the kitchen” with “the glittering silverware, moonlight on linoleum, silence.” At the same time, he adds an erotic element to it because he is the only boy among this group of girls in the kitchen, and he observes “the calves swinging back and forth.”

In "Flying Carpets," the narrator mentions that "our summers were always ending, and because they lasted forever, we grew impatient with our games, we sought new and more intense ones." This contradiction indicates how fluid the concept of time is for a child.

Heinrich Graum emerges as a new prodigy among automaton builders, being able to construct sophisticated and lifelike machines at a very young age. After running his automaton theater for many years, he suddenly disappears and not even his apprentices know what he is doing. Ten years later, he opens his new automaton theater, which is nothing like the old one because the machines are rather clumsy. Similarly, Sarabee seeks to remove the limits of amusement parks and constantly devises increasingly sophisticated rides.

In "Balloon Flight, 1870," the narrator uses metonymy to say that the people and soldiers of Paris are ready to attack the Prussians: "Paris is ready and eager."

In "The Way Out," the moon is described as a silent witness of the Harter's movements: "The moon startled him. It was disturbingly bright, like a white sun. It threw shadows of trees against the high stone wall of the park across the street and polished the fender of his car discreetly parked a block away."