Though one short story deals more directly with disappearance, both stories involve the idea. “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” deals with disappearance throughout the entire story, while “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” only brings it up at the end. In “Cat ‘N’ Mouse,” we get to see both the cat and the mouse vanish from not wanting to be apart. They keep each other’s lives interesting and worthwhile. And yes, the use of the fantastic here is not only that animals act like humans and survive every encounter they’re caught in, (much like a Tom and Jerry cartoon) but that these two characters, though seeking each other’s demise, can’t live without one another. One needs the other to survive and feel like their life amounts to something. We get this underlying theme perfectly in the final scene when the mouse erases himself to be with the cat.
This idea flows into the next story, “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman.” Elaine Coleman vanished due to a lack of being noticed. She was quiet and kept to herself and no one ever seemed to remember her. She needed other people to keep her self alive. Elaine, without having someone else to interact with and to make her life interesting, slowly faded from existence.
While “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” is clearly part of a separate section of the book, the “Opening Cartoon,” it very well sets the structure for the following section “Vanishing Acts.” These are two stories about people (or animals) needing each other to keep themselves alive. Only when we’re gone do people begin to notice us, that’s what we can take away from Elaine Coleman. And what we can take away from”Cat ‘N’ Mouse” is that we don’t realize how important someone actually is to us until they’re gone.
Both stories are good examples of how much we need others (people, cats or mice) in our lives to be known as well as to be remembered. So often we don’t want our picture taken or we don’t want to go to a family event but those memories are very much a part of who we are and without them, we will eventually fade.
I think this idea of a need for some sort of companionship, or even just acknowledgement, across both stories is interesting and not something I had connected before now. Since we got to see inside the minds of the cat and mouse, it makes me wonder what Elaine was thinking before her disappearance. Maybe she, too, felt the need to “erase” herself.