The article sets out to prove that the haunting effect of Peter Carey's remarkable short fiction is largely due to his masterful manipulation of cognitive schemata the reader is invited to employ to make sense of the action. This paper investigates Carey's use of metalepsis (i.e., the transgression of the borderline between the text world and the actual world), which incriminates the reader in the cultural critique voiced in the story; it also examines the disturbing ambiguity as to whether the narrative is situated in fictional reality or in the dream world of a character and the sustained oscillation between realistic and fantastic scripts; and it analyses the startling reversal of the wonted relationship of figure and ground in Carey's stories and the blending of provocative but disparate images which cannot be harmonised into a unified cognitive schema and thus resist closure. These features, it is argued, destabilise our reliance on the most familiar and basic laws of the acutal world, create existential anxiety and make the stories persistently reverberate in the reader's mind.
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