This creative writing project is a well-balanced work, as the creative work emerges from a critical understanding of form (story cycle) and thematic engagement (doppelganger, bildungsroman). The creative piece is emotionally moving, while the critical piece engages in particular with James Joyce’s work concerning bildungsroman and the form of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The discussion of Fight Club is insightful as well and is relevant to the dramatic weight of the creative piece.

In Dubliners, James Joyce contends that life should be divided into four stages, namely: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. Yet, life is not linear in a way where one can pinpoint the exact shifts from one stage to another. Through this capstone project, I aim to explore the mutability and fragmentality of life. My creative project Ebb & Flow, an experimental bildungsroman short story cycle, accompanied by a critical commentary, consists of two completed short stories, tracing the journey of P from childhood innocence to mundane realities. The first story “Whistling Wind” employs a child focaliser and children’s fantasy to render a six-year-old’s processing of her mother’s death, while the second story “Ripples” adopts the technique of the double and the play script form to stage the teenage protagonist’s internal division. Through the lesser recognised literary means of stylistic forms, each story is able to mirror the protagonist’s distinct cognitive and emotional state; while the fragmentary nature of the overarching short story cycle structure provides a simultaneous self-sufficiency and interdependence necessary to constitute a life that is fragmented yet interconnected. Life takes the form of water, fluid, back-and-forth, and prone to change. Each story is an incident in the protagonist’s life, a drop of water, and it is the culmination of these stories, the short story cycle, that constitutes P’s sense of self, an ocean. Ultimately, drawing on literary precedents including Joyce, Cisneros, Gerstenberg, and Haddon, and engaging with the theoretical frameworks of Mann and Salesses, Ebb & Flow strives to show that the experimental short story cycle, with its gaps and stylistic ruptures, is the only viable vessel for a Bildungsroman about life’s mutability, the aftermath of loss, and the idiosyncrasies of grief and trauma.

I believe that writing, as private as it is, is a site of liberation. Ebb & Flow, entailing the little known sides of girlhood and growth, is the project that grants me the opportunity to forge that silent quivering unnamed part of myself a form. This project proves to be one of the hardest tasks I have taken on during my undergraduate studies, for it requires not just creativity, but also research ability. While writing creatively comes as natural as breathing, writing consciously requires intentionality, self-awareness, and critical distance. Therefore, I want to take this opportunity to thank Professor Eddie Tay for the unwavering guidance on writing creatively, and for the freedom he entrusted to me in my writing process. I would also like to thank Miss Karen Cheung for her support and acknowledgement of my creative pieces.

As Cixous urged women to “write her self”, I will now bring my understanding of writing and narrative form to whichever field I will be in, and continue to write to bring what was unseen back into existence.