The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan

First published: 1934

Type of plot: Character study

Time of work: The 1930's

Locale: San Francisco

Principal Characters:

• The writer
• The lady at the employment agency

The Story

"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" is divided into two short, titled parts. The first and shortest (only three paragraphs long), called "Sleep," describes the dream images and thoughts of a young San Francisco writer before he awakens on the last day of his life. His sleeping mind is flooded with a series of unconnected impressions, including cities (Rome, Paris, Jerusalem), writers (Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevski), political figures (Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler), animals (a reptile and a panther), and purely imaginary scenes ("the magnified flower twice the size of the universe").

The writer's sleep is ended in the second and longest section of the story, "Wakefulness." He is poor, having only one tie and drinking only coffee for breakfast. He reminds himself that in the unconscious world of sleep, from which a welter of images has just been presented, all human experiences are unified. In that death in life, one can experience eternity.

The real world that the writer inhabits is quite a different matter. The streets are cold and grim, and he walks noisily, as if to affirm himself in the face of an uncaring world. The lyrics of the popular song "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" float through his mind and, throughout the story, he associates himself with the circus acrobat who so skillfully performs feats of daring. His amazing feat is merely to get through the day.

The writer finds a penny in the gutter, and realizing that he can buy almost nothing with it, fantasizes about what he would do if he had money; he would buy a car, visit prostitutes, but most important, buy food. He is reduced to meals of bread, coffee, and cigarettes, and now he has no more bread. There is no work for him at all, much less work for a writer. From a hill he looks at the city and thinks of it as a place from which he is denied admittance. He lives in a society in which the work he does is not respected. He plans to write An Application for Permission to Live. He thinks of the possibility of visiting a Salvation Army kitchen, but he decides instead to live his own life, and play out the part that he has chosen for himself. Once again he thinks of himself as the daring young man on the flying trapeze, but now he also considers that the landing place of the trapeze artist may be God or eternity, the eternity he glimpsed in sleep.

He continues his walk through the city, passing restaurants that he dares not look into, enters a building, and visits an employment agency. When asked what he can do, he says he can write, and the clerk expresses no interest in this skill, asking further if the writer can type. There is no work even for a typist. He visits another employment agency with the same result, and department stores also have no jobs available. He visits the YMCA to obtain paper and ink to write his An Application for Permission to Live but begins to feel faint from hunger and must go to a park to drink a quart of water and revive himself. He sees an old man feeding pigeons and almost asks him for some of the crumbs this man is tossing on the ground. The writer goes to the library near the park and reads but again feels faint and has to drink water to recover.

The writer leaves the park and walks back to his room, thinking to go back to sleep, as there is nothing else left to do. Back in his room, he prepares coffee without milk or sugar, both of which he has run out of and for which there is no more money. He had stolen paper from the YMCA and hoped to finish his An Application for Permission to Live, but the act of writing is too difficult for him. He looks at the penny he found and wonders if he could get more pennies and thereby obtain enough money to go on living, but he inventories all the items that he has already sold and realizes that there is nothing left to sell. He has sold his clothes, his watch, and his books. None of these losses troubles him except that of the books, which he wishes he still had.

The writer looks at the details on the penny and considers its simple beauty. Now utterly weak, he falls on his bed, expecting to do the only thing left to do, sleep, but in fact the only thing left for him to do is die. His last conscious thought is that he should have given the penny to a child, who might have been able to buy many things with it. As he dies, he joins the unity that he had seen in sleep that morning. Like the trapeze artist, he makes a graceful exit, not from an acrobatic apparatus but from his body. Now that he is dead he becomes "dreamless, unalive, perfect."

Bibliography

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Hamalian, Leo, ed. William Saroyan: The Man and Writer Remembered. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.

Haslam, Gerald W. "William Saroyan." In A Literary History of the American West, edited by Thomas J. Lyon et al. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

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