The Emperor of Elam, and other stories — Story, Setting & Ideas

Dialogue as Duel

The excerpt from “Susannah and the Elder” exemplifies Dwight’s reliance on dialogue to advance plot and reveal character. The conversation between “the Elder” and “the Younger” unfolds as a series of parries: the Elder believes he has secured a romantic understanding by offering a pendant, while the Younger undercuts each assumption with a cooler logic. The exchange is structured like a fencing match—each rejoinder deflates the other’s confidence. Dwight uses italics and dashes to mark shifts in tone, as when the Younger says, “We make love!” with a particular inflection. The scene ends not with resolution but with the Elder turning on his heel, leaving the reader to infer the outcome from the rhythm of the dialogue itself.

Recurring Images of Gifts and Settlements

Throughout the excerpt, material objects—especially gifts—serve as ambiguous tokens of intention. The Elder offers an “antique pendant” as proof of commitment, but the Younger dismisses its significance: “you might give her seventy-three pendants, and I presume her heart is large enough to hang all of them.” This image of jewelry as a hollow symbol recurs in the Younger’s claim that young women accept “necklaces, tiaras, stomachers” as “natural tribute,” no more meaningful than wildflowers. The word “settlements” appears repeatedly, first as a financial term, then twisted into a joke about plural marriage. Dwight uses these recurring motifs to question whether any gesture—material or verbal—can carry stable meaning across cultural boundaries.

Movement Between Scenes and Spaces

The excerpt is divided into three numbered sections, each marking a shift in time or location. Section I establishes the dialogue; Section II begins with “The Elder was visibly annoyed”; Section III opens with “He let several suns go down on a certain stiffness.” These transitions are abrupt, skipping over intervening events and relying on the reader to infer the passage of time. The setting is minimally described—a room, a terrace, an implied Italian or American backdrop—but the movement between scenes is signaled by changes in the characters’ emotional temperature. Dwight often ends a section with a punchline or a gesture, as when the Elder “turned on his heel,” then picks up later with the consequences of that exit.

Cultural Irony and the Unreliable Narrator

The Younger character in “Susannah and the Elder” functions as a kind of internal commentator, offering ironic asides about national customs. He describes his country’s tolerance of plural marriage and its philosophical acceptance of “diamonds or bankruptcy.” The Elder, an outsider, is consistently baffled by these claims, and the reader is left uncertain whether the Younger is teasing, telling the truth, or inventing traditions on the spot. Dwight does not resolve this ambiguity; instead, he lets the irony stand. This technique appears in other stories from the collection, where a character’s authority is subtly undermined by their own rhetoric. The effect is to make the reader question not just the characters’ motives, but the reliability of any cultural explanation offered within the fiction.

Readers approaching this collection will find that Dwight’s stories reward attention to the spaces between lines—the pauses, the unfinished sentences, the gestures that replace speech. The structure often mirrors the content: just as characters fail to fully understand one another, the narrative withholds easy conclusions. It is best to read these tales as a series of tactical encounters, where the real action happens in what is implied rather than stated.