An Analysis of The Thurber Carnival The Fables for Our Time contained in Thurber's The Thurber Carnival are, in my opinion, particularly good examples of a writer successfully 'breaking frames' in order to create humor and satire. In this essay I am going to explore the main methods Thurber uses to create humor and satire in the fables "The Shrike and the Chipmunks" and "The Unicorn in the Garden"2. Firstly though, what do I mean by the 'broken frame'? This is a reference to the idea that
Dickens, Thurber, Andersen, London and Perseus As far back as I can remember, my mind has always thought and learned by association. My brain fancifully connects things like computer terminals and bus terminals, Indian reservations with plane ticket confirmations, and carpetbaggers with rug stealers. Don’t ask me why, but I think I get bored with ordinary human communications and then lapse into my imaginary fantasy’ association world, finding it much more fascinating than the nightly news, soap
As America was changing during the early twentieth century, so was humor and few writers could easily adapt to this change with success as well as James Thurber did as a cartoonist, journalist, and an author of short stories, fables, fairytales, and plays, Thurber highlighted the problems of everyday life that were often the result of the transition in America from a masculine, frontier society, to an urban, more feminized society (Buckley, New Criterion). He shied away from major problems of the