Set in mythical Humble County, Georgia, Days of the Endless Corvette tells the story of Earl Mulvaney, a high-school dropout and auto mechanic. Earl loves Ellen, the brainy and beautiful girl next door, who unfortunately must marry Troy, the star of the high school football team. Throughout the book Earl labors on his “Endless Corvette,” a project as impossible as trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Earl has noticed that each time he takes something apart and rebuilds it, there are leftover parts. He reasons that by disassembling and reassembling his boss’s ’59 Corvette, and saving the leftover pieces each time, eventually he will have enough parts to build an entire car, leaving the original behind. The novel ends with the suggestion that perhaps Earl has succeeded at his project, which stands as a metaphor not only for Earl’s hopeless love, but other searches for answers to life’s perplexities.

In making the point that no story is complete, O'Hagan undermines to varying degrees several dominant and interconnected Western ideologies: idealism, Christianity, patriarchy, class and capitalism. He also shows how a borrowed indigenous myth can be adapted to immigrant needs in a way that will distinguish Canadian novels from others.

Historical conditions of colonialism, and more recently, the emergence of a post-colonial state and urbanization, have brought about rapid socio-cultural change in the Solomon Islands, characterized by heterogeneity and the influx of new cultural products. Throughout this process, notions of tradition have emerged, iterated largely through the multivocal category of kastom which is fundamentally construed in opposition to notions of Christianity and modernization. This thesis examines how these changes have affected stories, specifically a group of narratives called "kastom stories," told by students in the urban setting, and how these narratives have become a space for tradition to be stated and created. Notions of genre are explored to discover how such an amalgam of stories as that of the kastom stories regarded here could be considered as a group. I examine story structures to understand how elements from diverse sources could become integrated to the stories, and look at transformations which, in distanciating the stories from their original socio-cultural context of production, serve to recontextualize them in their present socio-cultural setting.

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