A Short Guide To The City - Major Themes

Major Themes

The "Broken Span" is representative of the gulf between reality and perception in the minds of the citizens and the desire for closure. Their myriad violent outbursts is, as described by the text, a pathway towards that closure. Patricia Moir agrees with this symbolic framework and sees this as a recurring element in all of author Peter Straub's fiction. She describes the central issue as individuals or societies "perhaps understandably, construct barriers of denial to protect themselves from knowledge they do no wish to possess" yet those "who do not confront their invisible realities and somehow integrate them into their lives are doomed to remain forever incomplete." And "in the experience of violence there lies knowledge essential to an understanding of their failures, their fears, their hopes, and most important of all, of the universal fact of their mortality. The secrets of the invisible world must be uncovered, communicated, examined, and acted upon if life as a whole is to have any honest validity."

"A Short Guide to the City" is firmly rooted in the Gothic literature tradition. It goes to extreme lengths to establish the atmosphere, discarding any attempt at a traditional narrative in lieu of overwhelming details about the makeup of the city. The city's discarded buildings, much like the abandoned ghostly castles of yore, give rise to a diversity of emotions inherent in the downfall of man made structures. The arcane and violent rituals of the townsmen also give off a Gothic air, in the past reserved for religious or pagan spectacles. Perhaps more than any other element, the story's fascination with darker elements of the past and their effect on the current events is what steadily places "Guide" in the Gothic tradition.