The Fascinating Stranger, and Other Stories — Background and Themes

Narrative Voice and Social Irony

The opening of 'The Fascinating Stranger' uses a detached, philosophical narrator who undercuts the protagonist's pretensions. Tarkington describes Tuttle's tear and murmur of 'Oh, Gosh!' with mock solemnity, then digresses into a wry meditation on property. This voice recurs in other excerpts: when a father fails to understand his son's rudeness, the narrator notes the parents see it 'as an effect detached from cause; therefore inexplicable.' Such commentary aligns with the catalog subject of social life and customs, but the excerpts reveal a sharper, more ironic edge than a simple period portrait.

Children as Social Barometers

In the story excerpt featuring Ludlum, a child's behavior exposes adult hypocrisies. Ludlum insults a visitor's weight, then is placated by a mysterious explanation about handkerchiefs. The parents are baffled, but the visitor understands the boy's unspoken logic. Tarkington writes, 'Children can’t tell their reasons, but they’ve always got ’em!' This moment, along with the mother's fear of lightning and her elaborate 'insulation' with drinking glasses, shows how children and their fears or bluntness reveal the anxieties beneath polite surfaces. The catalog subject 'United States -- Social life and customs' is thus rendered through family friction rather than broad social panorama.

Setting and Sensory Detail

The excerpts are rich with specific, sensory details that ground the stories in a particular time and place: a limousine filled with shavings, a garden of 'pink-speckled blossoms,' poplars showing 'silver sides' in the wind, and a drawing-room with gilt chairs and flat-bottomed glasses used as insulators. Tarkington uses weather—a thunderstorm that drives characters indoors—to heighten domestic drama. The catalog subject 'Short stories, American' is evident in these localized settings, but the excerpts show a preference for interior spaces (limousine, porch, drawing-room) where social rules are tested. The physical world is never merely decorative; it often mirrors characters' emotional states.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to Tarkington's narrative asides and the gaps between what characters say and what they mean. The stories reward attention to small gestures—a tear, a laugh, a shift in seating—that carry more weight than the plot summaries suggest. The excerpts offer only fragments of twelve stories, so the full range of voices and situations remains to be discovered.