Plot
The main character, Mike de Wolf, is a struggling pianist in New York. His friend, Horace Hackett, is an author and popular pulp fiction writer, who writes about Mike as the villain in his book, a swashbuckling adventure story. The story begins in Hackett's basement-level apartment in Greenwich Village. Mike enters the bathroom of Hackett's apartment, and hears the sound of someone typing on a typewriter. After electrocuting himself, Mike loses consciousness. He subsequently awakens to find himself on a beach in the year 1640, as a character within his friend's novel.
Mike learns he is regarded in this world as the villain, Spanish Admiral Miguel de Lobo, a "pirate potboiler". He knows that the villains in stories written by Hackett often do not come to a favorable end, and is therefore eager to safely leave the realm to which he was transported. Mike recognizes the specific work into which he has been transported: "he had no doubt at this was 'Blood and Loot', by Horace, and that the whole panorama was activated only by Horace's mind. And what Horace said was so, was so. And what Horace said people said, they said."
The story takes place on the high seas in the Caribbean during the 17th century with a conflict among colonists. When a major event occurs, Mike hears the sound of a typewriter in the sky. Mike's reality literally changes each time the author makes a change to the story. Hackett writes under pressure, as he is facing a deadline. He falls in love with a woman in the story, but grows frustrated after realizing that she is just another of Hackett's fictional creations. At the end of the work, Mike returns to New York, but questions whether he is still a character in someone else's story. He muses whether or not there exists a "typewriter in the sky", which is in effect creating the world. Mike looks up into the sky in search of this mystical device or its controller, "Abruptly Mike de Wolfe stopped. His jaw slackened a trifle and his hand went up to his mouth to cover it. His eyes were fixed upon the fleecy clouds which scurried across the moon. Up there – God? In a dirty bathrobe?"
Read more about this topic: Typewriter In The Sky
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)