I began working on what would become my thesis almost two years ago. At the time, I was becoming frustrated with the results of my writing and realized what was all-too-apparent to my professors and peers; namely, that my stories lacked a core sensibility, character, or perspective needed to anchor fiction.

This thesis is an effort to draw out that ‘I’. For months, I struggled to find ways to keep from giving the narrative ‘I’ a biography, hoping that sensibility would be enough to carry the writing. As the narrative developed, the question of ‘why’ became more central to the narrator. Why is the narrator telling the story? Why is he leaving? Why anything? In these three chapters, the unnamed narrator begins a series of departures and arrivals, each of which explore questions of home, absence, race, and how people define themselves in relation to place.