Witcover is an editor and writer whose fiction, book reviews, and critical essays appear regularly in print magazines and online media. In the following essay, Witcover discusses Charles Johnson's use of postmodern techniques in Johnson's story.

What to make of Charles Johnson's "Menagerie, a Child's Fable?" The story saw its original publication in the literary magazine Indiana Review in 1984 but appeared in book form for the first time in Johnson's 1986 collection of short fiction, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Titles are always a good place to start thinking about a work of fiction, and the title of Johnson's collection suggests elements of magic, moralism, and multiple allusion that find purposeful echoes and variations in the individual stories it contains.

The title The Sorcerer's Apprentice is familiar to most people from a sequence of that name in the famous Walt Disney film, Fantasia, in which the cartoon character Mickey Mouse...