Theses and Dissertations Collection

This collection of fiction short stories explores self-conception and fractured psyches while juggling eclectic philosophies and mythologies in surreal landscapes. These stories attempt to reconstitute various images and moods from works of poetry, music, and paintings in parallel with the dominant themes—such as metempsychosis, dissociative psychological phenomena, and theories of consciousness, absurdism—that run throughout. This thesis functions somewhat as a collage of mythologies of place and creation as a wave of destructive interference, of grief (from vengeful anger or stubbornness, to firmly held delusions, to paradoxical degrees of acceptance) within the Sisyphean struggles of the characters to highlight the possibility of a grounded center within absurd environments—both real and storyworld amalgamations. The blurring of characters’ inner-selves with the natural world often lends to the use of the pathetic fallacy as portals for self-reflection and projection to render an undifferentiated understanding of people and place.