The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Saroyan
- First Published: 1934
- Type of Work: Short story
- Genres: Social realism, Short fiction, Character study
- Subjects: Authors or writers, Poverty or poor people, Death or dying, Hunger
- Locales: San Francisco, CA
“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” the story giving Saroyan's first collection of stories and sketches its title, initially appeared in Story magazine. The piece is basically an impressionistic reverie. Although told in the third-person voice, it works through the recording consciousness of the unnamed protagonist, an impoverished writer who is literally starving to death. The writer's thoughts are disjointed and incoherent, as is characteristic of the stream-of-consciousness technique used by French novelist Marcel Proust, whose work the writer reads in the...
[The entire page is 629 words long]
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