Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction

Steven Millhauser’s “Dangerous Laughter” uses human reactions such as laughter and crying as a metaphor for the dangers that come with using drugs. It is clear from the beginning that the “laughter” that the protagonist and other girls are partaking in was dangerous, as the protagonist writes that “the game began innocently and spread like a dark rumour,” thus becoming addicted to the act and performance of this laughter, writing that these “upheavals were something we hadn’t known before, something that would take us where we needed to go.” (Millhauser 76)

Clara Schuler is used as the symbol of innocence we all are before the evil we give into, whether that be through peer pressure or from own personal choice. The protagonist describes Clara as “strange and solitary,” only having one friend at school. The reader can infer that there might be something a little more to Clara, except it is never touched on. It is her one friend, Helen Jacoby, who introduces Clara to these “laughing games,” and she quickly becomes skilled, getting “invited to all the laugh parties, applauded, and talked about admiringly, for she had a gift of reckless laughter we had not seen before.” (82)

The end of this short story is the most devastating, as Clara Schuler has become so dependent on this laughter that she is not even recognizable, eventually dying from the thing that she used as an escape. What is sad about this is not that she dies, but how all of her friends, and even her own mother, didn’t stop her. Instead, all of her friends watch her in disgust as she partakes in fits of laughter. The protagonist writes that “after the first hour, I understood that no one was going to forgive her for this.” Our protagonist is the last to leave this gathering, trying to stop clara but not knowing how, witnessing Clara’s death.