Date of Award

Spring 5-11-2018

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Advisor

David Kress

Second Committee Member

Elizabeth Neiman

Third Committee Member

Richard Brucher

Abstract

This thesis is a novella that explores themes of emotional abuse, grief, toxic masculinity, sexuality, and gay violence. The author deploys a frame narrative that encompasses short stories that are tied by a narrator in the novella. The narrator’s stories create a continuity between “real,” realistic, and surrealist fictions. These explorations of fiction create a conversation between the frame narrator’s “real” life and that of her stories. As the novella’s plot progresses, the frame narrator’s sanity deteriorates, which allows her to become increasingly grotesque. The grotesque situates how macabre the frame plot is, creating a connective tissue between the “real” and the “surreal.”

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