Bliss not only succeeds in building up a story made of different stories, but also proves the fiction to be a form ideally suited to convey the mutability and fragility of reality (Shaw 17). In this sense, Carey's Bliss can be considered a collection of narratives it can be analysed as a great 'container' of 'one hundred stories', and many intertextual references, for example to Shakespeare and Marquez, enhance this meta-narrative quality.
In Mansfield's story the title is ironical, but only partly so in Carey's novel, for Harry Joy will reach a true 'bliss' at the end however, both are 'about modes of perception, about how people live within their own cosy fictions, which often bear no relationship to the way things are' (Dovey 202). Peter Carey began his literary career as a short story writer, and his first novel Bliss (1981) is certainly more of a continuation with than a breakaway from this genre the title itself connects the novel with Katherine Mansfield's short story 'Bliss' (1920) and, like Bertha Young, Harry Joy believes his life is 'blissful', only to realise he is in 'Hell'.
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