The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 42
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self and the functions of perception co-occur in the same materialist brain-operations.
Furthermore, which data warrant sustaining in the ongoing narrative of self (that is, which
warrant even being noticed and held in attention for any but the briefest of Dennett's revisionist
instants) is determined by the disposition of those memes that have acquired the self in question.
In some extreme self-worlds, the cannibalism scene would not even exist if the self in question
were not motivated to sustain it in its ongoing report of self-and-situation.8 A self's anxieties
determine the construction of its world.
In George Saunders's "Sea Oak," the self narrating the story builds a world that includes
a risen corpse as manifested narratorial anxiety. The narrator-self struggles with the threat of the
mundane swallowing the story's characters (which, it must be recalled, the narrator-self has
created: their appearances, utterances, even their very existence are all determined by what the
narrator-self is motivated to focalize into its narrative). Further, though the story is narrated in
first-person, we cannot know definitively if this is a self, an "I," that the narrator has created for
itself or if the narrative is as simple as the main character creating a story-postmodern relativism
dictates that it must interpretively be both. The narrator understands the main character as a
middling stripper who caters primarily to women: "What a stressful workplace. The minute your
Cute Rating drops, you're a goner. Guests rank us as Knockout, Honeypie, Adequate, or Stinker..
.. I'm a solid Honeypie/Adequate .. ." (88).9 The main character and his sisters live paycheck-to-
paycheck, nearly beyond their means and locked in a depressing and dangerous normality. Later,
when their peaceful aunt Bernie dies, the narrator realizes she died "Scared to death in a crappy
apartment" (93). When Aunt Bernie, who throughout her life experienced only the steady
mundane, dies, she becomes a perfect (no longer changing) form-an expired self that, for certain
now, will never escape the very-normal oppression that the main character also suffers from.42
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/46/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .