The Souvenir Museum Literary Elements

Short Story Collection

“It’s Not You” is set in the Narcissus Hotel on January 1, 1993. The context here is important because the name of the hotel is juxtaposed against the repetition of many spoken lines in the dialogue which serves to create an echo effect. Thus, the setting is this story is distinctly important to its construction as an allusion to the mythological story of Narcissus and Echo.

“Mistress Mickle All at Sea” is a story all about narrative point of view. The perspective is third-person omniscient with the narrator freely able to penetrate into the mind of the title character. However, the title character is a TV character played the actress who is actually the central character of the story. Despite this, the narrator insists upon referring to the actress named Jenny Early by her character’s name. In addition, the narrator often poses rhetorical questions and on occasion directly addresses the reader. The cumulative result is a story in which the issue of perspective itself seems to be the primary thematic interest.

More than any other story, “Proof” is about deriving meaning from the tone and mood. Short on dialogue and marked by long paragraphs of densely written prose relying heavily on imagery to sustain the narrative, it is a story with a distinctively elegiac tone. A heavy mood of shameful regret lays over the mostly eventless story.

Protagonists: A couple named Jack and Sadie appear either together as a couple or separately in a number of different stories across the breadth of the collection and they are the closest thing the book really has to a definitive protagonist. Antagonists: most of the stories not featuring Jack and Sadie are tales about people in conflict with themselves and as a result the antagonist in those selections is often the main character’s interior drive working against them.

“Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark” is the story in this collection most dependent upon dramatic conflict to its resolution. The conflict is situated within Bruno and his obsessive fear of Cody—the son he shares with unmarried partner Ernest—drowning amid the simulated water terrors at the Schlitterbahn water park in Galveston, Texas.

Cody does wind up getting swept away and, in the process, manages to lose his swimming trunks, but not his life. The experience is pure adrenaline as he cries out how he was capsized and then is saved. The story reaches its climax with Bruno’s final, romantic exclamation, “Marry me.”

“The Irish Wedding” is the opening story of the collection and it is about Jack and Sadie attending a family wedding. “Nothing, Darling, Only Darling, Darlind” is the final story in the collection in which Sadie is convinced that the time has come for her and Jack to finally marry each other.

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As Mistress Mickle briefly considered the temptation of escaping from her life by simply jumping from the deck of the boat into the water below, her silent contemplation alludes to two infamous cases of famous people who vanished and were never seen again: Judge Crater in America and Lord Lucan, officially known as John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan.

The scatological implications of the line “The bride and groom will now cut the cheese” being confined to American slang becomes significant imagery at the end of “The Irish Wedding” when American girl Sadie cannot stop laughing long enough to explain why the announcement strikes her as so funny.

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Dialogue is constructed in parallel repetition throughout “It’s Not You” as part of the story’s allusion to the mythological figure of Echo: “Can I have your maraschino cherry?” I asked. “No maraschino cherry.” “I love maraschino cherries.”

“Midnight will blow your mind” is a metonymic reference to the spectacular New Year’s Eve fireworks show in the skies above Rotterdam.

“A Walk-Through Human Heart” is filled with references that personify the bird species known as the grackle. The first such example is “A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom.”