The Knife Thrower | Characters & Character Analysis

The Knife Thrower Characters

The story is told in the first person plural, and the effect is such that an entire community is speaking collectively and is a character unto itself. The narration seems to come from one perspective while maintaining the notion of a collection of voices. This allows judgment to be placed on the entire group and devotes attention to a group of people rather than singling out just one person who is responsible for fascination with Hensch—the fascination is the effect of a society, not of one single person's individual experiences. The group experiences the show together, and together the community must deal with the effects of the show: "as we left the theater we agreed that it had been a skillful performance, though we couldn't help feeling that the knife thrower had gone too far." The audience experiences a complexity of feeling, from understanding, to confusion, to sympathy, to a...
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