Characterisation and Ideology in Peter Carey's Short Stories Clare Pryor 12th Grade

Peter Carey’s collections of short stories explore societal expectations and subvert gender roles against a surrealist and/or dystopian background. In The Fat Man in History, we enter a reactionary society in which the conquering “Fat Americans” and “the old Danko regime” have been overthrown in the “revolution”. Fat men are viewed as “grotesque and greedy” because “only the Americans and their friends had had enough food to become fat on”. This attitude of “fear and hatred” towards fat men and the Americans they epitomize reflects the uneasiness felt by contemporary Australian society towards American influences, at the time Carey was writing, a concern he also touches on in The Chance. The dystopian world of The Chance is run by the alien Fastalogians, but there is also a passing reference to their precursors, the Americans, who had seduced the Australian population with “a technology we could neither control nor understand”, a statement of Carey’s own political views.

However, The Fat Man in History seeks to explore another question: the impact of societal stereotypes on the individual. Alexander Finch has “always been anti-Danko”, but because of his “glandular fat”, a condition of which “people” in general seem to have no...