In the Valley of Rats and Other True Tales
Abstract
This thesis chronicles the shifting dynamics of family relationships that arise, the gains and losses we sustain, when we choose to leave home and make our own lives. These are personal narrative essays, and while the subject matter is often deeply intimate, I strive to keep my involvement, my close personal attachment, from devolving into solipsism. To this end, I efface the narrative self as much as possible, limiting my presence as a narrator to keep from eclipsing the presence of others, and I do so by maintaining a strict devotion to detail; I aim to not only accurately reconstitute the image, character, or memory, but to capture its essence, to create a means for reference and association that is not only clear and lucid, but instilled with pathos. I try not to overburden the reader with the cerebral, the allegorical, the interjections of a detached narrator; rather I try to forge a connection based on feeling, on the evocation of emotion, so that whatever moral or instructive elements that exist within these essays might be gleaned not by inference or deduction, but by intuition. The ensuing division, of the suppressed narrative self from the self of the story, the character self, excites a tension that manifests throughout as a narrator both disconnected and inseparable from the events playing out around him, existing in a space beside himself, the observer and the observed, caught between worlds and forever slipping two steps behind his own life. From this distance, this simultaneous proximity and remove, I seek to reveal a fuller, clearer picture of the characters and events that are the subjects of these essays, a devoted exploration of the complexities and motivations that drive us, that bring us together and pull us apart; I seek, in short, to cast a bit of light on the transitory and paradoxical nature of our shared humanity.
Description
This thesis has been embargoed for 10 years and will not be available until July 2028 at the earliest.
Keywords
Family, Place, Grief, Loss, Addiction, Mental illness