Essay on ”The Knife Thrower”

To make a choice is easy, but to make the right one can sometimes be very difficult. To speak one’s mind and stand up to your opinion can also be tough, especially when in a large crowd, but sometimes this is the most important time for doing so. In Steven Millhauser’s short story, “The Knife Thrower”, the ambiguity of the narrator’s view on the knife thrower’s act is really drawn out and exposed in the spotlight, very unlike the knife thrower’s act itself which is very mystical and sort of hidden in the shadows.

“The Knife Thrower” - the name says it all, but at the same time it tells us nothing about the text. The story is very secretive and does a very good job capturing the reader. It seems as if once you have read a couple of lines, you are instantly drawn into the mystical and dark atmosphere in which the story is unfolding, and you simply cannot stop reading. To mention some of the themes in the story there are entertainment, moral responsibility and passivity. These three themes come together very nicely in the story and they play a big part in shaping the reader’s impression of the audience’s opinions towards Hensch and his performance. The knife thrower, Hensch, is the main character of the story, but throughout the text we gain very little knowledge of him. He is very mystical and doesn’t speak a word during his act, of course this is done to make him an anonymous, but still a central character for the story.
“If rumors of this kind were disturbing to us, if they prevented us from celebrating Hensch’s arrival with innocent delight, we nevertheless acknowledged that without such dubious enticements we’d have been unlikely to attend the performance at all.(p. 1, ll. 17-19)” The use of “us” and “we” in this quotation tells us that there are more than one narrator, maybe even that the whole audience acts as narrators