Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - László Dányi: Decoding Decoded Systems: An Interpretation of Steven Millhauser's "In the Penny Arcade"

The story offers several traps to those readers who look for a revelation in it. What a relief it is to those readers who want to sort out all the elements of the plot and to make sense of the story, when they come across the following sentence, "All at once I had understood the secret of the penny arcade" (Millhauser 144). At least two factors could annoy the complacent reader. On the one hand the past perfect tense shows that he had realized why he had had the strange feelings in the penny arcade before he told us the story, so the revelation to him does not come along with the reader's unfolding the secret while reading the story. On the other hand if one was to unravel the plot in the linear sequence, the boy should have left the arcade through the exit, which would have meant closing the story and having an end to it. Here the exit and the entrance are the one and the same, which underlines both the lack of an end to the story and the way the author combines, welds and melts contrasts together. The emphasis on the process without the end-result recurs in the story as the boy is thrown into various situations and watches varied activities without experiencing the end. He catches sight of the old fortune-teller but does not want to have her predict anything to him because feeling betrayed he leaves her. Or in another situation he watches a woman struggling with her several layers of clothing, and the description of this scene focuses on depicting the process of taking off the pieces one by one, and before the climax the boy is drawn into another situation, "I felt a melting languor, a feverish melancholy, until I knew that at any moment

—'Hey!' I tore my face away. A boy in a yellow T-shirt was shouting at his friend" (143). The expected achievement of the climax never comes, "I waited for something to happen, for some unspoken promise to be fulfilled, but all at once the movie ended" (139), and the scene again results in disillusionment. The story constantly turns back and repeats its complication without reaching the climax. So the emphasis is laid on the process towards the climax and not on the climax itself. 13