The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 52
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Jason Erik Lundberg's "One Less."26 The main character, a salesman locked in his job and at the
mercy of his employer, is denied the opportunity to spend a birthday with the woman he loves
because of work demands. From this one lack-of-control irruption into the main character's
personal sphere, the character's world becomes an acting place, animated by the character's
projected anxieties about self and control. By degrees, the main character is erased from the
world of his own experiential space until he is ultimately relegated into the form of a lamp in the
corner of the room he shared with his former lover, who is now involved with one of the main
character's old coworkers. In "One Less," the world is literally out to get the main character in
the sense that his inadequate assertions of self and his lack of control have empowered those
aspects of the environment that his self is motivated to perceive. He bilocates into a world he
creates that is the projected perfection (the logical conclusion) of the course of his present
concerns of self. And of course, as Dennett points out, memes may not necessarily be good for a
self-they are interested primarily in their own perpetuation, in keeping a hold on a self s
attention, of being the self. In a story (textual or self), they situate themselves most
advantageously for the very perpetuation that defines them.
As a textual self-model, "One Less" can extend itself through whatever length-of-story-
time best suits the narrative, but when applied to actual self-narrative, the entirety of "One Less"
serves as an example, perhaps, of a complex metaphor that might last only a few fragmentary
seconds in a self s consciousness as it struggles suddenly to deal with a loss-of-control crisis,
such as the main character's invaded birthday. Anxiety creates the metaphors, the weird, that will
(for as long as it needs to be addressed by the self) model the self s concern with sustaining its
own narrative. According to Neisser,
... human beings are not concerned only with the present; they also remember the past,
prepare for the future, and imagine possibilities that may never be realized. I suggest that52
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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/m1/56/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .