THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE
by William Saroyan, 1934

There are several contexts in which one can read "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze." Published and set in 1934, William Saroyan's story about the Great Depression dramatizes the plight of a sensitive young man who starves to death because he cannot find work. As Saroyan's first successful story, "The Daring Young Man" holds a prominent place within the author's literary corpus: it announces the basic affirmation of life or "being" that recurs throughout his writings. In this story as in others the specter of death serves to stimulate the protagonist's awareness of life; its proximity leaves this young man "thoroughly awake," "lithe and alert," and hypersensitive to details as mundane as the smell of "a cut melon" or the feel of a smooth, polished penny.

Another context in which to read "The Daring Young Man" is the one Saroyan provided when he positioned it in a collection of stories by the same title. Like "Seventy Thousand Assyrians," "Aspirin Is a Member of the NRA," "Common Prayer," and others, "The Daring Young Man" has for its main character a writer and as a central aspect of its plot the problem of how to write when neither the inner self nor the external environment will cooperate. The letter-writing protagonist of another story from the collection, "A Cold Day," summarizes the predicament in a most straightforward manner when he writes: "That's the fix I'm in: waiting to write and not being able to."

Why can't so many of Saroyan's writers in this collection write? Ostensibly the main character of "A Cold Day" cannot write "because of the cold." But as that story and its 1930s context implies, the real reason he is unable to write is that he earns too little to heat his small room. A similar but much more grave situation confronts the daring young man of the title story, who will starve because he writes "prose" for a world that values only "good penmanship" and the ability to "use a typewriter." In the social worlds represented by the stories in this collection there is no place for the writer or the perspective on social reality that he articulates.

This situation is both unfortunate and ironic because Saroyan's writers are not necessarily social critics. "Let this be your purpose," the protagonist of "A Cold Day" advises himself and his reader; "to suggest this great country." In "The Daring Young Man" a similar conviction, which Saroyan represents most clearly through the protagonist's fascination with a penny he finds in the street, deepens the irony to the point of tragic loss. As Saroyan's young writer polishes the penny he ruminates over the collection of sacred phrases that decorate its surface: "E Pluribus Unum One Cent United States of America … In God We Trust Liberty." During this delirious reading we realize the full dimensions of his problem: he is a writer who will starve to death in a society that defines its primary values in writing.

According to this context, therefore, Saroyan's story dramatizes the dilemma of the writer who does not produce the right kinds of texts for his social order, who cannot earn the words on the coin with the words that fill his imagination. Saroyan highlights this dilemma at the end of the story as the young man dares to leave incomplete his Application for Permission to Live. Without this document, he dies. But as Saroyan points out such a death amounts to nothing less than a new life that is "dreamless, unalive, perfect." In the final scene the world that requires documentation of this sort—the world of employment agencies and "department store" jobs—"circles away." "With the grace of the young man on the trapeze" the protagonist soars away to become "all things at once." His destination, Saroyan tells us, is the source of all life, that ground of "being" that at some level motivates all of Saroyan's fiction. Significantly this vast unknown territory appears to him as "an ocean of print undulat[ing] endlessly and darkly," perhaps the ultimate metaphor for the writer's experience of heaven.