Trust: Truth and People

A Kind of Flying is comprised of compilation of selected short stories by Ron Carlson. The stories are mostly written in first person. Carlson writes the story in an extraordinary and sensitive way with bizarre surface happenings. The stories are filled with imaginative humorous tales with epigrammatic dialogue. In the selected four stories titled, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife,” “I Am Bigfoot,” “The Tablecloth of Turin,” and “The Chromium Hook,” describes the concept and the difference between truth and reality, and what we choose to believe and not to believe. Credibility is one of the major themes addressed in the stories. It is also emphasized that determining between what reality is and what is not is a very difficult decision. Carlson appears to give the reader the degree of truthfulness; however, most of it is in fact not true. In the “Bigfoot Stole my Wife it is not his wife’s intention to leave him, but rather believe that she is kidnapped by big foot hairy beast man. The power of credibility is addressed in all four stories. (thesis). The biggest theme of the “Bigfoot Stole my Wife” is credibility as what people will believe in. It is the story that deals with the narrator's extraordinary experiences. It is about a guy, who has traumatic experiences all his life. Moving, his mom having a boyfriend, and=2 0the discovery of the boyfriends "dude" magazine all the way leading up to his wife leaving him because he is too involved in the horse races. He either stretches the truth or creates scenarios (such as bigfoot stealing his wife) so he can deal with these traumatic life experiences. Because he has been dealing with these traumatic experiences, since he was a teen through stretching of the truth, he has no credibility up through his adult hood. Moreover, it has a story about a flooding river. He keeps asking throughout the story, whether the readers can believe on him. He claims that no one believes anything anymore, and near the end, he says the following: