Almost every story we’ve read so far by Steven Millhauser in Dangerous Laughter has centered around a modern, suburban town slowly slipping into madness. It may not even have to be the town itself, but rather just the town’s residents. In the short story “Dangerous Laughter”, we witness a small town fixated on this idea of laughter (and later weeping). “The Room In The Attic” ends with our narrator questioning if the girl he’d been talking with ever really existed. Even in “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman”, a town obsessed with finding this woman and what happened to her, doesn’t care more than the narrator himself. Finding her becomes more important than ever, only to reach the conclusion that they were the reason she vanished. Quite an uncommon reason. Could it be metaphorical, or could it be madness?
The idea of the slipping of the self in a modern American world is also demonstrated in two other stories we read: “History of A Disturbance” and “The Dome”. While one story deals more with a man on a personal level, the other deals with the nation as a whole. The man’s very idea is to live in a world without words, but it can be expanded to the idea that he wants to live in a world that isn’t easy to comprehend (hence his frustration with the phrase, “What a wonderful day!”). This can seem crazy, or even fantastic. “The Dome” could be showing how power hungry a government may become or even just the crazy advancement of technology. Whatever the case, Millhauser writes about impossible things in a modern world, creating the illusion that we are slowly descending into madness.