Abstract

In a Mist consists of seven short stories ranging in genre from crime fiction, to speculative fiction, to realist fiction. These stories relate to one another through their common concern with their protagonists' self-imposed social isolation. The protagonists of this stories are strongly drawn to romantic and emotionally evocative forms of cultural expression such as renaissance liturgical music, early twentieth-century cinema and vocal jazz. Their private emotional and intellectual investments in these forms provide an escape from the external realities that they find threatening. When social interaction with the external world becomes a necessity, the cultural inclinations the protagonists have cultivated determine the way in which they define themselves and how they relate to those around them. My thesis takes its working title from the name of a composition by jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The trajectory of Beiderbecke's tragic life, cut short at the age of twenty-eight due to alcohol-related illness, provides a subtext for several stories in the collection including "Alice and Roy" and "The Death of Benjamin Hirsch." The title is evocative of the eccentric and mysterious quality of Beiderbecke's creative genius. In relation to my thesis, it evokes the elliptical quality of the stories themselves. Major incidents in the character's lives are often implied rather than shown, exposition is withheld, or left deliberately ambiguous. The reader, like the protagonist, is left to deduce what has transpired based on symbols or outlines of events that the narrative does not divulge directly.