There is a famous Chekhov quote that goes, "There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws." Passive protagonists having good days are hardly, if ever, the components of lasting, memorable fiction. The protagonists of these stories confront life's claws. Developing these stories, I was particularly concerned with knowing the protagonist's voice and using it to guide my writing. The stories are all either first-person or third-person-limited. Sometimes I knew where the story was going from the outset; other times the path of the story unfurled as it was written. The crux in writing these stories was to stay consistent with the narrative voice, through every impulsive maneuver. Humor is an important component of these stories. I admire characters that find solace in humor, and I find humor is an effective device to subtly punctuate the deftness of many risky narrative situations. Every story contained within is a footnote to other stories; they are the stories of an apprentice given go at the forge. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2003. / October 23, 2003. / Nonfiction, Fiction, No yearning, Yearning, Human, Short Stories, Darkly Funny, Disturbing, Serious, Dynamo, Sprawling, Sad, Menacing, Surreal, Real, Muscular, Rhetorical / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; R. M. Berry, Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_175864 |
| Contributors | Walsh, Ryan (authoraut), Winegardner, Mark (professor directing thesis), Berry, R. M. (committee member), Butler, Robert Olen (committee member), Department of English (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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