Abstract

The Donkey Prince is a novel in progress about a year in the life of a high school graduate who embarks on a series of adventures in a quest for security, truth, love and meaning. It is a Canadian novel about coming of age in the early 1980s, and takes place in Montreal, Toronto, and British Columbia. The narrative intentionally echoes the dramatic first person voices of hard-boiled American fiction and the French nouvelle vague, though it adheres to the facts of experience and is therefore a form of memoir. The goal of the thesis is to show the discontinuities that can occur between perception and reality as it follows the protagonist's search for answers to questions that cannot be answered; to show the disconnection between knowledge of the abstract and knowledge of relationships; to explore differing varieties of awareness and reveal the uncertainty of self-knowledge through dramatic fictional representations.