Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1986

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Jon Manchip White

Committee Members

Maland, Penner

Abstract

Who am I? What am I doing here? And am I doing it right?These are important questions for all of us. In three stories--"Matinee "The Theme of Love in Victorian Poetry," and "The Man Who Knew Nothing of Mirrors" —I attempt to raise these questions and examine them in various lights. "Matinee," a short story, deals simultaneously with three levels of being: reality, fantasy, and memory. In this story a young man, while watching a B-grade adventure movie, is reminded by events in the theater around him of something that happened when he was a boy--something that, in his own mind at least, parallels the action on the screen. In "The Theme of Love in Victorian Poetry," another short story, the narrator is the key figure. He is the one constructing the story, bit by bit, often making great leaps in logic and ultimately imposing an artificial structure on a rather simple situation: a man sits in a bus station. But the process the narrator goes through in creating this structure, I believe, parallels the process by which most of us create the structures known as our selves. Finally, "The Man Who Knew Nothing of Mirrors" is a long story in which the main character. Will Arthur, has been damaged by life, and his perception of the world is thus a bit skewed. But in his skewed perception he achieves a kind of understanding that few normal men ever know; he comes to know himself as few people ever know themselves. All three of these stories, then, deal with the question (or questions) of identity. I do not pretend to answer these questions; I merely wish to raise them in such a way as to provoke thought and to encourage the reader to seek answers of his own.

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