Changing Lines is a collection of five short stories that focus on pairings of opposites. In the title story, a boy in split custody chooses whether to live with his fundamentalist Christian father or his occult mother. In "Diminishing Returns," a gifted girl is paired with an incompetent girl for a badminton tournament in her high school gym class. In "Invisible Orbits," a talented guitarist in poverty joins the band of a wealthy and well-connected singer. In "Unable to Die," an older therapist confronts her past as she consoles a grieving student facing his uncertain future. The collection closes on "The Color in Your Cheeks," the story of a successful game developer who finds out his younger brother has run away from home to make adult videos with their childhood next-door neighbor. The stories all center on the tension and change liable to occur when heavily contrasting individuals are forced to interact, portraying how these worldviews are formed with an aim at psychological and sociological nuance. While each story is told in a traditional linear narrative style, the collection is varied in its use of point of view and vantage point. Questioning truisms serves as the main driving force of the collection, while the themes of how neuroses are formed in childhood, spirituality, projection of one's own weakness onto others, coping mechanisms, the psychological effects of demographical status, and internalized contempt are all explored in varying degrees.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd2023-1183 |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Creators | Reynolds, Spencer L |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024 |
| Rights | In copyright |
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