As if We Were Already Free

• Other Authors: Neary, Dyan (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_2015fall_Neary_fsu_0071N_12954

As If We Were Already Free is a novel narrated in the first person by Mackenna Doyle, a 26-year old man in prison for murdering a high school classmate when he was sixteen, a crime of which he admits culpability at the outset of the novel. One of the inciting incidents that prompts Mackenna to begin telling this story is the disappearance of his best friend and love interest Eliza, who, until three months before the novel begins, has maintained consistent correspondence with him for ten years. Mackenna spends part of the first chapter, which functions as an extended prologue, trying to figure out why she has disappeared from his life so abruptly and without warning. Mackenna is an apotheosis of the "intellectual solitude" common to a minority of people who end up serving long sentences in the General Population of state penitentiaries. There are two timelines and two stories the narrator is telling concurrently: One is the present-day prison timeline, which sets the acute tension of the novel, and the other is the story of his life as a teenager in New York City in the nineties with his two best friends, misfit kids from Staten Island—the soft-spoken, perspicacious albino Colin, and the unfailingly altruistic Eliza. The novel encompasses both gritty realism and satire, interwoven with themes of poverty, injustice, and exiles. === A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. === Fall Semester 2015. === November 2, 2015. === Includes bibliographical references. === Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Thesis; David Kirby, Committee Member; Diane Roberts, Committee Member.