Perspectives in a young century : an honors thesis (HONRS 499)

Abstract

As the title "Perspectives in a Young Century" implies, my concept for this creative project was to write short stories that illustrated the lives of different types of people living in this postmodern society. I also wanted to include some poetry that might offer the reader some insight into my personal feelings about love, politics, and the struggle to cope with this fast paced, technological world that we have come to know. By doing this, my hope is that certain readers might identify with a particular character or a specific line of poetry and feel like they actually have something in common with others in a world that seems continually divided and distant. In this abstract, I have attempted to summarize the major themes of my short stories so that my intentions are understood more clearly and with the hope that a reader might look at the story differently after seeing exactly what messages I was trying to convey in it.My first story is titled "Sacrifice." With this story, I tried to examine the life of a high-profile sports figure and all of the stress that comes with being famous. I was particularly interested in boxing because of its gruesome nature and the fact that billions of dollars are generated by this barbaric sport still to this day. Although our society is supposedly concerned with things such as ridding the media of violent images and striving toward a more peaceful world, millions of people still won't hesitate to spend money watching two people bash each other's heads in. Not only did I try to allude to this point throughout the story, but I also focused on the media scrutiny that follows around sports figures like the main character Cedric. Now that the media is so pervasive and allencompassing, the smallest details of an athlete's life are often put on display for the world, and no matter how strong-willed that particular athlete is, the burden has to weigh them down sometimes. With Cedric, I also made a point to make him an African-American athlete, because I am intrigued with the way that these people are treated in our culture. There seems to be a double standard, where our society claims to want African-Americans and other minorities to succeed, but when they do so in excess such as a boxer like Cedric or an entertainer, the media and others constantly try to pick them apart and find flaws in their character. All of these pressures compounded for Cedric, and throughout the story the reader can see his mental state become more and more fragile. I thought that contrasting Cedric's fragile persona with his muscular figure would also be interesting, and I hope that the reader might come away from the story actually feeling some sympathy for someone like Cedric who may be a multi-millionaire, but is still a regular person inside with conflicted thoughts and emotions.With my second story, "Station Fever," I took a much more light-hearted approach and tried to make the story comical and fun to read. I first got the idea in a journalism class where we had an assignment to take a regular news story and try to make a humorous column out of it. I selected a news clip about a team of Russian cosmonauts heading up to the space station, and after I started to develop ideas for the column, I saw an opportunity to stretch it into a short story. For the most part, the story speaks for itself. A group of three cosmonauts take a trip to the space station to do experiments with growing food in low-gravity conditions. Before they went on the mission, the three were good friends who hung out together even outside of the workplace. However, because they know each other so well, after they are isolated up in the station for a little while, they start to pick at each other's faults and the situation becomes childish. Basically, I thought it would be a funny idea to have a group of learned, rational scientists degenerate into a couple of bickering roommates, much like the ones you find on college campuses. After I had completed the story, the tragedy with the U.S. space shuttle made me think twice about including the story in this project since it showed space exploration in such a trivial way. However, I came to the conclusion that the story was not meant to be taken seriously anyway, and a story about space that wasn't filled with technological jargon and science-fiction cliches just might be refreshing to readers."Taking It" is the title of my third short story, and it is the first one to focus on a main character that is simply an average, middle-aged U.S. citizen. This main character's name is Samuel, and he is the quintessential "momma's boy." In a society that has gradually become more feminized over the years, these people whose mothers continue to rule their life even after they are supposedly independent intrigue me. The Oedipal complex idea relates to this very much, and although I didn't specifically allude to it in the story, the concept was in the back of my mind as I wrote the story. The main character Samuel is in his mid-thirties, and although his mother has been dead for a few years, her incessant guidelines on how to live the proper life still dominate Samuel's decisions. He wishes to break free from her grasp, and he decides that he wants to do something rebellious that she would not have approved of had she been alive. He considers several options, but many of them are illegal, and although he desires to do something rebellious, he still follows the rules strictly and always strives to be the perfect law-abiding citizen. Therefore, he decides to go with a psychic reading, because his mother's religious beliefs firmly condemned superstition and sorcery, but it is not illegal to visit a psychic. He goes to a side of town that he rarely frequents so that there is less of a chance of someone recognizing him, because his conscience still haunts him and he still feels the need to hide from his mother's all-seeing eye. After visiting the psychic, Samuel becomes uncomfortable with how accurate the psychic is about his life, and he becomes flustered and leaves. As he gets ready to drive home, he sees a woman outside of the car parked in front of him who has a flat tire, and he decides to help her. A conversation ensues, and the woman eventually asks Samuel out on a date. This obviously makes him extremely nervous, but he decides that this is the perfect chance to turn a new page in his life, and he takes it.My final short story is basically an autobiographical piece about my relationship with my grandfather on my mother's side of the family. His wife died when I was very young, so I never came to know my grandmother, and after her death my grandfather fell into a deep state of depression, leaving him detached and completely non-influential in my development as a young man. I know this fact always bothered my mother, and it caused the subject to be a touchy one in my house for several years. I got the idea to write a story about it after I took a trip to see my grandfather in his assisted living facility while I was home one summer during college. I had never really had an in-depth conversation with him before this day, and after I visited him and was amazed by how philosophical and intelligent he was being, I decided to write a story about it. I also wanted to write a story in first person, and although I realize that this point of view proves to be extremely hard for many young writers, I felt comfortable writing this particular story in first person. In addition, I think that rather than my emotions getting in the way of the story, they actuallymade it a more heart-felt story that perhaps other young people like me with relatives in nursing homes might relate to. The story also contains a deeper theme about life and the fast pace at which it goes by, and this was my attempt to bring a more universal truth to this personal and emotional story.As for my poetry, for the most part I like to let it speak for itself. As I stated earlier, my main purpose for including the poetry was to give the reader some insight into my personal thoughts and emotions that influence my writing, both poetry and prose. Many of the poems contain social commentary and my political views, and others simply try to create a scene, describe someone, or speak of love, the strongest of human emotions. In general, I like to play with the English language and create inner rhymes, odd meters, and hidden meanings in my poetry. This might cause some people to think that the poetry is too abstract and they might not pick up on all of the meanings that I intended to convey, but if they are captivated by just one line of a poem, I feel like my writings have been a success. I think the beauty of poetry is that it can be interpreted in different ways by different people, and although the author may have had a specific theme in mind, if a reader can take away an entirely different meaning, that just makes the poem more special. Like the short stories that I have included, I hope that my poetry illustrates various perspectives from different types of people living in this new century, and if the reader can feel like he or she shares a common bond with a particular character in my story or a concept in my poetry, I feel like I have touched them in some way and contributed something meaningful to this increasingly meaningless world.Honors CollegeBall State UniversityMuncie, IN 47306