Steven Millhauser is a writer of realist fiction. However, his work cannot be limited by labeling it only realistic. Another dimension is added to his short stories. They are full of interpretations. In Flying Carpet, though the story seems to be quite casual, even banal - a child trying to reach the sky on to his flying carpet - there is another way to read it. This story is a way to catch reality and to express a hidden meaning through inter-textuality.
The passage studied here begins with the achievement of the dream of the child: he is flying up to the sky. However, when he reaches this space, he feels a "fear of never coming back". He feels oppressed and begins to look forward to something else: materiality. Through this change of mind, the author includes transcendentalism to his work, which is a new way to look at things. The narrator however still hesitates between the two paths. Does he really want to live in total reality, or does he want something else? Does his flight reveal a will of subversion?
Throughout this passage, the narrator feels a "fear of never coming back" (l.14). This denotes the fear of the infinite, which leads to a loss of identity.
[...] The fact that the narrator finds himself an escalator leading up to boy‘s pants“(l.38) is also symbolic. The escalator is a way to go upstairs, a link to an upper space. As the sky is an upper space, it could also be a link between sky and earth. There is, consequently, another intermediate space, an in-between space: a place of hesitation. This hesitation may be linked to a desire of subversion. Initially, the narrator wants to transgress the limits of the spaces. [...]
[...] When taking into account the whole story, it can be noticed that the child wanted to escape reality by using his carpet to go up in the sky, and maybe touching the moon which he saw at night. However in this extract, the narrator clearly wants to go back to earth. He is afraid of “never coming back” (l.14). This change is a revelation which is transcendental. Indeed, the child has found a new way to look at the world. [...]
[...] The fear of this intermediate space and the fear of losing his identity led the narrator to leave this space, and return to reality. This is the fall of the narrator towards earth. This fall is clearly symbolic. It embodies the end of a dream: the end of childhood, but it also symbolizes a return to reality as well as to materiality. Was this blue color a revelation for the child; a way to change his point of view with respect to reality? [...]
[...] The sky, a space of nothingness, of immensity and vastness, is opposed to the earth thanks to the use of taxonomies, in which lists of objects - of real things - replace the repetition of These taxonomies give the reader the impression that the narrator is back to the real world, a material world full of usual things: “Grandma was coming for a visit; Joey's uncle had brought real horseshoes with (l.40-41). Those two spaces are consequently an opposition between vastness and nothingness, and materiality, abundance. [...]
[...] The narrator is “pursued by blue” (l.21), he is trying to escape this intermediate space, longing for materiality, the hardness under green grass” (l.13). He is afraid of the infinity of this space, its nothingness; this surrealist invading blue is “passing into” him (l.15). This fear of the intermediate space where the narrator feels lost, leads him to wonder about his own identity: I still (l.6). Indeed, while he is flying in the blue sky, he projects himself on the earth, looking at the carpet from the ground. [...]
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