Essay Questions

What does “The Moth” ultimately have to assert about the concept of an irrational fear?

The protagonist, W.T. Hapley, is clearly not reliable and quite possibly insane. Therefore, trust must be invested in every other witness and they are all in agreement that the moth Hapley claims to see does not actually exist. Were the moth proven to be a creature of tangible reality, it would, indeed, be the villainous figure in this nightmare. Failing evidence that such is the case, the role of antagonist must lie elsewhere. One thing that is not in doubt is that Hapley’s behavior is an authentic reaction to the belief that the moth exists.

Thus, the antagonist of the story is defined as—and the subject of the story identified as—the rationality of a fear of an irrational belief. It is, in a sense, a rejection of the concept of an irrational fear. If the moth actually existed and was behaving as Hapley insists, his fear would be considered rational. The story suggest this is a mistake in semantics: the fear itself is rational because Hapley believes in the moth, it is only the belief in the moth that is irrational.

How is “A Deal in Ostriches” similar to the film The Usual Suspects as a result of its ending?

Both “A Deal in Ostriches” and The Usual Suspects are framed as stories being told by one person to another. Although both begin with the assumption that the storyteller was either entirely or mostly a relatively innocent bystander, that assumption is famously revealed to be mistaken in one case. Nevertheless, a story is told by one person to another which seems to be highly unlikely yet is conveyed with a descriptive detail that is convincing enough to dispel doubts. The basic premise of the story Verbal Kint confesses to a police detective in The Usual Suspects and the basic premise that one of five ostriches swallowed a valuable diamond are quickly accepted by the viewer or reader as the version of what did actually happen.

It is only at the end of both stories that another alternative version of the story that wipes most or everything that the reader has been led to accept as what actually happened is introduced. Coincidentally enough in both cases this revelation arrives as the result of a person behaving in a manner that does not jibe with what we’ve been led to believe about them. In neither story, however, is the truth of what actually happened made explicitly clear.

Why is “The Stolen Bacillus” often categorized as a parody?

At first glance, the dramatic action of “The Stolen Bacillus” seems to be a thrilling melodrama with the highest possible stakes: an unstoppable cholera epidemic bringing the population of London to its knees. The tone of the piece is present quite seriously and when the Anarchist thief who steals the cholera bacillus is rhapsodizing about the theft and his subsequent actions will gain him the notoriety unfairly absent all his life, it could not at the time but bring to instantly to mind all the recent terrorist attacks around the world committed by self-described anarchists. The excitement and dramatic tension is then weirdly undercut by the revelation that there was never any real threat because the man had not stolen cholera and the Bacteriologist knew this all along.

The climax comes with anticlimactic revelation, but the story goes on for another couple of pages. This denouement turns out to be the actual point of the story which turns out to be a commentary satirizing the frenzied paranoia whipped up among the populaces of cities around the world to the threat of a very successful anarchist attacks which had been quite understated in their success in comparison to the paranoia reaction being generated toward them by sensationalistic journalism.