Beyond the Curve Literary Elements

Short story/Surrealistic fiction

The stories are notably and purposely set within vague sense of time and place. Contextually, however, no matter how bizarre the incidents and events, every story takes place within a realistic world.

These stories feature either a direct first-person narrator or a first-person perspective told through third-person narration.

The tone of these stories are flat, emotionless and direct. This stylistic choice is a necessary component for creating a dominant Kafkaesque mood of paranoia, a surreal dislocation from reality, and a profound sense of alienation.

Varies individually from story to story, but overall the protagonist/antagonist dyad is one pitting normal everyday people against the inexplicable machinations of a fate with a bizarre sense of humor.

The major conflicts of most of these stories pits one character’s sense of self-identity with a sudden, unexplained turn of events that forces them to question that certainty about who they are or what their existence really means.

Varies, but generally speaking, the stories are marked by characteristic ambiguous anticlimax: a man trying desperately to rid his apartment of an unknown corpse in order to avoid suspicion falling on him fails to carry out that task and puts it off; a man whose identity has been stolen by his business card fails to resolve the conflict at the office with the knowledge that the card must eventually try coming back home; a man claiming to be a Martian is taken sent to an asylum with the question never really be answered as to whether he is really from Mars or simply a nut case.

In “The Crime of S. Karma” the unexpected perpetrator of the identity theft of the title character is foreshadowed during the desperate compendium of items which he realizes no longer identify him by name: “Back in my room, I hunted vainly in every drawer of my desk. My brand new box of business cards was empty.”

The opening to “The Irrelevant Death” is a perfect example of the type of understatement which pervades the narration of these stories: “He had company. The guest was lying face down with his legs stretched out neatly toward the door. Dead.”

Several of the stories feature plots about human transformation and are told in a narrative style which allude very strongly to Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis.”

The dominant imagery throughout the stories is of the protagonist experiencing a sudden dislocation from normalcy and undergoing a twisting of reality forcing them to see things in a different way. This recurring sense of alienation from the expectations of what has come before is centered in the opened words to “The Crime of S. Karma” in which the narrator observes “I woke up. Waking up in the morning is a perfectly natural thing to do; nothing unusual about that. So what was different this morning? Something or other was definitely odd.”

In “The Bet” an idea is developed for something like what would be termed “reality TV show” today which offers a grand prize for the successful completion of a paradoxical situation: the contestant goes to a deserted island completely naked and must come back with fully dressed in civilized clothes in order to collect the prize.

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“The Crime of S. Karma” revolves around the surreal plot of a man’s identity being stolen by his business card. The business has been so personified that it is capable of sexually harassing his secretary by striking her thigh.