Satire In Ron Carlson's Bigfoot Stole My Husband

Ron Carlson uses satire as a tool to expose the narrator's egocentric and self-exemption from responsibility. In “Bigfoot Stole my Wife”, he tells a story of how his wife has disappeared, but not by her on inclination. He goes into a hyperbole of how she did not leave him, that she was in fact taken by Bigfoot, listing reasons why he was to be believed. As he begins telling his point of view, he states “It makes me sad to see it, the look of disbelief in each person’s eye. Trudy’s disappearance makes me sad, too… (85)” This shows he is putting a higher value on people’s confidence on his account then his own grief for his vanished wife. This already gives the account a different motive and thus seems like the narrator may be manipulating his audience in order to maintain a notion of honesty.

He recalled that his wife would often say, “‘One of these days I’m not going to be here when you get home,’things like that, things like everybody says. (85)” Her comment is seem as a commonplace thing to say with in a relationship and thus cannot be taken as a sign that she wanted to leave. In addition to this, he says that half of her clothes have been taken along with her dog, Buster. This is brushed aside to that if she had planned in advance to leave that all her things would have been taken with and also, gave possibility to Buster have been eaten by Bigfoot. Giving the blame to a creature that is commonly mythical causes a veil for an already unreliable narrator that causes the reader to not know what is the truth and what is