Abstract

Degrees of Separation is a collection of four short stories exploring one character’s quest to return home through an unconscious process of refraction and destruction of self. The stories explore themes such as home, selfhood, innocence, love, loss, imagination, and self-destruction. In “Accidental Death,” faced with an experience of loss that she is emotionally unable to comprehend, Liz splits herself into three, projecting her fear onto a shadow, and her pain onto a bird which she kills, marking her first exile from self. In “Shadow Play,” Liz is trapped in a painful process that all at once mimics and destroys her sense of home. She projects her weakness on a proxy, which becomes a target for her anger against herself, and snaps out of the cycle only when she acknowledges the effect of her destructive power on the proxy, but not on herself. In “Cyrano,” Liz continues to search for home, projecting her desire to be saved onto a woman, and unconsciously ignoring her pain to hold onto her at all costs. Liz also projects her innocence onto a child, and experiences something close to love in her effort to protect it from herself. In “Fourth Degree Murder,” Liz has repressed her pain by erasing its traces from the visible world. She projects her fear of destruction on a man, which she instrumentalizes to violate herself. In the end, though Liz is literally faced with her own image, she fails to recognize it as the locus of home.