This thesis is the first of three sections in what will be a book-long project of creative nonfiction essays. The book will parallel the author's diary with three other family diaries, spanning four generations. This thesis deals with the first of those diaries, written by Antonio Bonetti's, the author's great-grandfather. The narrative traces the author's struggle with clinical depression, juxtaposing this with his great-grandfather's political struggles in the city of Trieste during the nineteenth century (then under the Austro-Hungarian empire). Both the author's and Bonetti's diaries are excerpted and commented on by the author, comparing the author's experiences as a psychiatric patient with those of his great-grandfather as a political prisoner. This is the "conversation" of diaries. The irreverent tone of the Antonio Bonetti's prison diary confounds many of the author's expectations, leading the author to discover more commonalities than anticipated, namely a sense of humor in the face of severe diversity (the punchline as life boat). / Graduation date: 1999

In the first section of the critical part of this thesis, we study the phenomenon of simultaneous narration in first-person singular prose fiction. In the second section of the critical part, we outline the defining traits of the omniscient "I"; by proposing this figure, we fill in a gap in current narratological theory. / The second part of this thesis, a short piece of prose fiction, is written in the first-person singular and uses simultaneous narration. The "I" is omniscient and occasionally exercises this power. The text begins when the heroine, Sarah, decides to tell the story of the rest of her life. No particular event justifies that she begin her story where she does, other than a sudden impulse to communicate what will be the story, that she still doesn't know, of her life.

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is a "fictional memoir" in which the narrator, Nick Jenkins, describes the events and characters he has observed throughout his life. As such, the primary focus of the novel would seem to be those characters and events, but the way in which Nick relates his story has a considerable impact on the narrative, and, therefore, on that primary focus. Powell has not only chosen to employ a first-person narrator, thereby establishing a specific, and individual, narrative voice, or point of view, but he also has that narrator consume much of novel by describing his perceptions of the world he observes, and this brings into focus the nature of that perspective. Hence, this paper examines the nature of Nick's role in the novel, both as character and narrator, and attempts to delineate the effect that that role has on the novel as a whole. Essentially, Nick can be characterized as a "reader" who, in effect, "interprets" the characters and events he describes, thereby contributing his imagination to their "construction". Whether he reads actual texts or observes human behaviour, Nick engages in an interpretative process which is analogous to that in which a reader interprets a text: interpreting "signs", constructing "causes", translating texts into images and "meaning-bearing" ideas, and subjecting his own "reading" to scrutiny, thereby effectively "rereading" previous "interpretations". As a "reader", Nick is interested in more than mere description: he not only desires to understand the nature of the people with whom he is involved, but also to appreciate the significance of the events he witnesses, so as to form a kind of pattern which would reveal the central themes of an age. In so doing, he does not merely relate "what happens", thereby "putting up a mirror" to his past; he also describes his experience of that past, so that the narrative does not so much present "reality", as it presents Nick’s perception of reality. Nick's characterization as a "reader" is founded on specific theories regarding the nature of the reading process, especially as they apply to the relationship between reader and text, and, therefore, the products of his "interpretations" are considered in relation to the creation of fiction. In essence, Nick's "reading" results in the construction of the characters and events he observes, so that ultimately he creates "fictions". In other words, because he does not present "reality", nor even a "reconstruction" of reality, but a "reconstruction" of his perception of that reality, Nick, in fact, "creates" his narrative, thereby constructing fiction. Hence, just as a reader creates the fiction of a novel by interpreting its text, so too does Nick produce fiction by "interpreting" the world he is portraying. Thus, in his "search for knowledge", in his efforts to understand the world around him, Nick "creates" that world, so that knowledge would seem to be the product of the observer's, or "reader's", construction - in essence; a fiction. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 465-484). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 465-484). Also available on the Internet.

This study develops a theoretical paradigm of narrative relations. The study posits the first-person narrator as a figure of authority within the text, a problematic figuration which implicates the text in issues of social relations and ideology with reference to questions of the narrator's empowerment. The study analyzes the first-person narrator's progressive engagement in the narrative relations of time and language as a means to assess the relative empowerment of the narrator by his narrating activity. The study argues for a Puritan legacy by which language retains its ability to empower and to enact a progression which, over time, has become a paradoxical diminishment of spiritual fulfillment. The first-person narrator thus stands as inheritor of the Puritan ministers whose status as the first American narrators confers on them an authority of origination to be acknowledged and supplanted by their successors. The form of this study seeks to unfold a progressive engagement of narrative relations, and models a movement toward a narrator fully engaged in progression, in mimicry of the Puritan doctrine of progression toward spiritual fulfillment. Using textual examples from among first-person narratives credited as the canon of American literature, the study associates characteristic narrative relations and empowerment with narrators it characterizes as impotent, including Ernest Hemingway's narrator, Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises, and the unnamed narrators of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Henry James's The Sacred Fount and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Characteristics of bachelor narrators are exemplified by Herman Melville's narrator, Ishmael, in Moby-Dick, and by Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator, Miles Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance. Affiliated narrators are discussed in terms of their textual enactment by F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Tennessee Williams's narrator of the reading edition of his play The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield, and Walt Whitman's narrator of his poem, "Starting from Paumanock."

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [155]-162).

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.