Date of Award
7-11-2015
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Department
English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing
Keywords
Creative, Disabilities, Feminism, Madness, Narration, Novella
Supervisor
Markotic, Nicole
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Airplane Pose is a short novel told from the perspective of three different narrators, all telling the same story. Lenny, Bradley, and Mason, all “disabled” in their own way, witness a woman, Nadia, fall to her death outside their apartment building. Airplane Pose chronicles the events, inside and outside of the narrators' minds, following her death. By using three different narrators, questions of narrative reliability are raised, particularly when issues of reality are called into question. Lenny desires to escape to a different reality, Mason's grip on his own reality is revealed to be unsteady and unpredictable, and Bradley attempts to understand the reality in which he exists. While reality doesn't change for any of the characters, each comes to term with his or her own ambiguous reality, just as the exact cause of Nadia's death is never truly established.. This unknown reality mirrors the unknown and ever-changing ideas of disability or ability; arguably, every character in the novel is in some way disabled, whether mentally, intellectually, or emotionally, which forces the question: is anyone actually abled? As with Nadia's death, disability becomes something unknown and undefinable.
Recommended Citation
Friesen, Lydia Clare, "Airplane Pose" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 5316.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/5316