Challenge 366

Life Is “But” a Dream?

Our Submissions guidelines state that we frown upon stories that end with “but it was all a dream” or with the narrator’s death. Explain why the following do not run afoul of those restrictions:
- Dean Francis Alfar’s “In the Dim Plane”
- Bertil Falk’s “Life Sentence”
- Walter Giersbach’s “Gothic Revival”
- Chris Knapp’s “Without a Yesterday”
- Ron Van Sweringen’s “Death in the Outhouse”
How do Franz Kafka’s dream worlds differ in form and function from those of Bertil Falk’s “Life Sentence” and Walter Giersbach’s “Gothic Revival”?

Why would Kafka’s combination of Surrealism and Expressionism be perfectly acceptable under Bewildering Stories’ guidelines?
In Walter Giersbach’s “Gothic Revival” two books are named by title: William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. How does Faulkner’s novel supply a tagline for the story? How does Ray Bradbury’s supply a model?

Bertil Falk’s “Life Sentence revives the well-known science fiction theme of the mental prison. Explain the philosophical implications.

Ron Van Sweringen’s “Death in the Outhouse” falls into the subgenre of the ‘joke made up backwards’. Does it contain an equal measure of poetic justice for both Marge and her husband?