Dinner Time 'And The Piano Player'

Albert Einstein once said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Absurd Flash Fiction is taking many different normal things or ideas, and blowing out of proportion to make a story. Two great examples of absurd flash fiction pieces are, “Dinner Time” by Russell Edson, and “The Piano Player” by Donald Barthelme. To start off, “Dinner Time” is an absurd flash fiction piece about an old couple filled with rage. It gets to the point where they go crazy and it does not end well. But, “The Piano Player” is about a husband and wife and the wife is just going off saying random things like, “I’m ugly, the kids are ugly,” and, “The ham died. I loved that ham.” All of absurd flash fiction stories have normal things and many different absurd things that makes the pieces as good as they are.
In the story “Dinner Time,” as the argument escalated, the couple kept threatening and yelling at eachother. The story says how the man hated pretty much everything and was going crazy. Edson wrote, “He hated the sound of the pot when it was beaten…,” and, “He punched himself again and fell on the floor. When he came awake again, he was quite angry so he punched himself again and felt dizzy. Dizziness made him angry…” He pun It got to the point where the man was done, so he ending up eating himself. But, of course, there were some normal things too. A few examples would be that, it was an old man waiting for his wife to make dinner, that him and his wife are arguing, and also that the wife dropped the dinner on the floor. “An old man sitting at a table was waiting for his wife to serve dinner.” That is totally normal in many different