Abstract

The eleven stories of "The Byron Notebook and Other Stories" are told from the perspective of distinct but similar young female narrators as they wander surreal realms. The stories are generated primarily by voice, as opposed to plot or character. The title story concerns the diminution of a narrator consumed by an imaginary love affair with Lord Byron. The subtitle, "A Private Argument," refers to her struggle not with Byron, but with herself, as she negotiates the gap between interior and exterior reality. The narrators interpret the world from the remove of an almost isolated interiority, in a playful or sad exploration of imagination and subjectivity. The imaginative is often encountered in collage with the real. Almost all the stories use first person perspective, a choice that is topical as well as formal. First person narration's double potential both to reveal and to conceal information is exploited, in enactments of alienation and epistemological skepticism. These first person narrators share information about their lives with the reader, but this knowledge may not be reliable; they are structurally and emotionally separated from the other characters and from the reader at the same time that reader-narrator intimacy is courted. Related to this limitation of perspective, much of the narration grapples explicitly with what can be known, or, more precisely, what cannot be: in "Catherine Irwin-Gibson" and "The Move," this epistemological concern borders on the genre of mystery. This concern relates to the way communication and love can be frustrated by language's limitations, a theme running throughout the project