Plot summary: In The Dwarf (1954), Ray Bradbury tells the story of a man with dwarfism who visits the mirror maze at an amusement park every night to reach a secret room where a mirror makes him look tall and elegant. That moment of illusion is his only refuge from a life of humiliation. Aimee, a young woman who works at the park, watches him with sympathy and, upon discovering that he is also a writer, decides to help him by having a mirror just like the one in the park sent to his home. Before the gift arrives, Ralph, the maze’s manager, driven by jealousy and a desire to mock him, replaces the mirror in the park with a distorting one that shrinks and distorts the figure. When the dwarf enters that night expecting to see himself transformed, he is met with a grotesque image that leaves him in shock. He flees in terror and, shortly after, is discovered to have stolen a gun. Aimee, feeling guilty, runs out to look for him.
Summary of The Dwarf by Ray Bradbury
On a hot, quiet night, on a pier where a half-empty amusement park stretches out, Aimee, a young woman who works there, looks at the sky, the dimly lit rides, and the few customers still milling about. One of the park’s attractions is the mirror maze, run by Ralph Banghart, a mocking and somewhat cynical man who plays solitaire while smoking a cigar. Aimee and Ralph chat, and he tells her about “the dwarf,” a man who enters the maze every night and stops in a special corner: a room with a mirror that makes him look tall. Ralph mocks him, but Aimee, moved, is interested in understanding him.
When the dwarf arrives that night, Ralph recognizes him immediately and watches him without being seen. He leads Aimee through a hidden passageway to a peephole that looks into the secret room. There, they both spy on him as the dwarf, entirely alone, stands in front of the mirror. What he sees makes him smile: his reflection is tall and elegant. In front of that reflection, the dwarf dances, salutes, and marvels. It is his only moment of joy. Aimee is shocked by what she witnesses. This intimate need drives her to seek self-esteem, comfort, and hope.
Later, Aimee and Ralph talk about the dwarf. Ralph, without empathy, mocks him and dismisses the possibility of helping him. However, Aimee, moved by a mixture of tenderness and admiration, suggests buying him a mirror like the one so he can have it in his own home. Ralph mocks the idea even more, saying that the dwarf would never accept it, that he is too proud and could not confess his desire even to a friend. Aimee, however, insists. She believes she has discovered something more profound: the dwarf is a writer. He lives alone, writes detective stories, and turns on his typewriter every night. He has published short stories in cheap magazines, and Aimee finds one of them—which she reads—written from the perspective of a dwarf who has murdered his stalker. Fascinated, Aimee believes that the man has a sensitive, profound, and creative mind.
Determined, Aimee orders a mirror like the one in the park to send to the dwarf at his lodgings as an anonymous gift. But Ralph, driven by jealousy or malice, gets there first. Without her knowing, he replaces the mirror in the special room of the maze with a distorting one: one that shrinks and distorts figures, even normal ones. When the dwarf returns that night, Ralph offers him free admission. Aimee is uneasy, suspecting that something has happened, but Ralph does not tell her what he has done. When the dwarf enters the room expecting to see his figure enlarged, he finds the opposite: his image is even smaller, more grotesque, and more deformed. Terrified and humiliated, he starts running, screaming, and crashing into the mirrors until he leaves the maze completely distraught. He flees desperately along the pier.
Shortly afterwards, a man from the park arrives, saying that a gun has been stolen from his shooting gallery, and Aimee realizes with horror that the dwarf could have taken it. Feeling guilty for having triggered the situation, she goes out to look for him.
The story culminates in a symbolic scene: Aimee stops in front of one of the mirrors in the maze and sees Ralph’s reflection, distorted and grotesque, as if he were a dwarf. Ralph also sees himself reflected in that mirror, and his face contorts at the image. Without saying a word, Aimee runs off into the warm rain on the pier, desperate to find the man who, even if only for a few moments, had been able to see himself not as the world sees him, but as he wanted to be.
Characters in Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf
The central character is the dwarf, whom others occasionally call “Mr. Bigelow” or “Mr. Big.” His physical appearance, flattened and deformed, is the primary source of his tragedy, but not the only one. The dwarf is also a lonely man, full of longing and quiet dignity. Every night, he visits the mirror maze not for fun, but out of necessity. In secret, he searches for the only image of himself in which he can recognize himself with pride: an idealized, elongated, and beautiful version. That moment of intimacy in front of the mirror is not narcissism, but refuge. The most revealing aspect of the character appears when Aimee discovers that he writes detective stories. In one of them, he confesses to being a murderer driven by years of humiliation. This fictional text within the story serves as a window into his inner world —a place marked by suffering and accumulated resentment, yet also by lucidity, intelligence, and creative talent. The dwarf is a complex figure marked by the trauma of an isolated childhood, social rejection, and the conflict between a limited physical body and a vast, yet confined, mind.
Aimee, on the other hand, serves as a mediator. She works in a gloomy park, surrounded by empty games, but she maintains a sensitivity that sets her apart from the rest. From the beginning, she shows concern for the dwarf, feeling a mixture of compassion, fascination, and a desire to understand. Her emotional evolution is remarkable: she goes from curiosity to commitment and, finally, to guilt. Aimee represents a form of courageous kindness, willing to make decisions that could improve the lives of others. Her discovery of the dwarf as a writer transforms her. She stops seeing him as a tragic figure and begins to perceive him as someone with a rich and meaningful inner life. However, her impulse to help, while well-intentioned, is also clumsy and indirectly contributes to the final tragedy. Her gesture of sending the mirror is noble, but it provokes Ralph’s anger and subjects the dwarf to further humiliation.
Ralph Banghart is Aimee’s opposite and, in many ways, her antagonist. He works at the ticket booth for the mirror maze and embodies cynicism, mockery, and contempt disguised as indifference. Although he is not an explicit villain, his actions are cruel and escalate in severity. Ralph watches the dwarf in secret, ridicules him, and finally sabotages his only moment of comfort by switching the mirror. He does this out of jealousy, out of the sense of threat he feels from the emotional connection between Aimee and the dwarf, or simply for the pleasure of exercising power over someone weaker than himself. What is significant about Ralph is that, although his actions do not seem to be the result of deliberate malice, they do reveal a profound inability to empathize. His final mockery is exposed when he sees himself reflected in a distorting mirror and is confronted with a grotesque image of himself. That wordless vision encapsulates the poetic justice of the story: those who mock the appearance of others are ultimately trapped in an image that caricatures them.
Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf
Ray Bradbury’s “The Dwarf” is a short story that explores a simple yet deeply disturbing premise: the complex relationship between appearance, identity, and desire. The story is set in a seemingly harmless environment—a half-empty amusement park—but from the very first lines, an atmosphere of stagnation, heat, and emptiness pervades. This setting, with its artificial light and dilapidated attractions, serves not only as a narrative backdrop but also as a reflection of the characters’ emotional state. The fair, far from being a joyful place, becomes a space of marginalization where spectacle coexists with humiliation and loneliness.
The central conflict of the story revolves around the symbolic use of the mirror. For the dwarf, the mirror that elongates his reflection is not an object of vanity, but a form of alternative existence. Facing his enlarged image, he can recognize himself as someone worthy of being seen, someone tall, with heroic proportions, capable of dancing and smiling without shame. That illusion, however minor, allows him to face his daily routine. Bradbury does not present this gesture as pathetic, but as deeply human.
All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, need mirrors that reflect a tolerable or desirable version of ourselves. The story suggests that identity is not only a physical or social construct, but also an imaginary one, a way of telling ourselves what reality does not always confirm. Aimee’s character embodies the possibility of empathy in a world that mocks difference.
She is the only one who senses the fragility of the dwarf and the richness of his inner life. Her gesture of commissioning a mirror for him is a way of restoring some dignity to him without invading his privacy or exposing him to embarrassment. However, her good intentions are thwarted by Ralph’s cynical and mocking intervention. The change of mirror is more than a cruel joke: it is a form of psychological violence, an aggression aimed at destroying not the dwarf’s body, but his only space of symbolic resistance. The scene in which he encounters his new reflection, in which his figure becomes even smaller, has a devastating effect. It not only deprives him of an illusion, but also of his last emotional refuge.
Bradbury’s writing in this story is restrained and precise, allowing the reader to discover the tension in the gestures and dialogues. There are no moralizing explanations or open judgments; the horror of the story is slowly built up through silences, furtive glances, and indirect actions. Pacing also plays a key role: the story moves slowly, as if everything were happening in a room closed off by heat and tedium, and when the conflict erupts, it does so suddenly, with a scream and a desperate race down the pier.
One of the most significant moments is the discovery of the text written by the dwarf. The story within the story offers a key to understanding: the narrator has been the victim of mockery and abuse, and eventually commits murder. Reading this fictional account, Aimee is moved and wonders whether the dwarf also harbors a silent resentment, a deep emotional burden that he cannot express openly. Writing is his way of channeling that pain. And here, Bradbury suggests one of the most complex ideas in the story: that literary creation can be born not only from talent or imagination, but also from suffering. The dwarf’s writing is not an escape, but a form of affirmation, an attempt to tell the world who he is, even if no one is listening.
In stylistic terms, the story employs sober, almost cinematic prose, marked by a keen attention to visual details: the lights on the pier, the reflections in mirrors, and the characters’ body movements. The use of mirrors, in addition to their symbolic significance, allows for a narrative structure in which the gaze—seeing and being seen—becomes central. The question that arises is: what happens when we see ourselves as we truly are, as we would like to be, or as others perceive us? The end of the story takes a significant turn: Ralph, who had mocked the dwarf for needing a mirror to make him tall, sees himself reflected in one that turns him into a grotesque and deformed figure. The reversal is powerful: for the first time, the mocker is exposed for who he is. At this point, the mirror assumes a symbolic dimension, where the reflected image appears to reveal people’s true inner selves.
Finally, the story ends with an open and disturbing tension: the dwarf has been brutally humiliated in his only place of comfort, has fled in a state of shock, and is known to have stolen a weapon. Bradbury does not tell us what will happen, but he hints at two possible paths: self-destruction or revenge. The possibility that the dwarf will take his own life cannot be ruled out, given the intensity of his despair, but there is also the threat that he will return armed to settle scores with those who have subjected him to such devastating cruelty. The story leaves us in suspense. As Aimee runs through the rain to try to find him, we don’t know if she will arrive in time or if her presence will make a difference. The story is anchored in this uncertainty, on the edge between the damage already done and the violence that may still be unleashed. The final question is not only what the dwarf will do, but whether anyone, at least one person, will be able to prevent the worst from happening.
