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A MIRROR TO THE FUTURE A thesis submitted to the Kent State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for University Honors by Jonathan Hyslop May, 2013 Thesis written by Jonathan Hyslop Approved by ________________________________________________________________, Advisor _______________________________________________, Chair, Department of English Accepted by ________________________________________________, Dean of the Honors College i ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………….vii CHAPTER I. PROLOGUE………………………………………………………………………1 II. CHAPTER 2………………………………………………………………………2 III. CHAPTER 3………………………………………………………………..……24 IV. CHAPTER 4……………………………………………………………………..30 V. CHAPTER 5………………………………………………………………….….41 VI. CHAPTER 6…………………………………………………………………..…52 VII. CHAPTER 7………………………………………………………………....76 VIII. CHAPTER 8………………………………………………………………....79 IX. CHAPTER 9……………………………………………………………………..82 X. CHAPTER 10……………………………………………………….…………...89 XI. CHAPTER 11…………………………………………………………………....91 XII. CHAPTER 12…………………………………………………………….….98 XIII. CHAPTER 13……………………………………………………………....110 XIV. CHAPTER 14………………………………………………………………113 XV. CHAPTER 15………………………………………………………………128 XVI. CHAPTER 16…………………………………………………………..…..138 XVII. CHAPTER 17…………………………………………………………….155 iii XVIII. CHAPTER 18……………………………………………………..………..162 XIX. CHAPTER 19………………………………………………...……….……172 XX. CHAPTER 20…………………….……………………………………..….192 XXI. CHAPTER 21………………………………………………………………201 XXII. CHAPTER 22………………………………………………………………213 XXIII. CHAPTER 23…………………………………………………………...….222 XXIV. CHAPTER 24………………………………………………………..……..231 XXV. CHAPTER 25……………………………………………………..………..243 XXVI. CHAPTER 26………………………………………………………...…….254 XXVII. CHAPTER 27…………………………………………………………..267 XXVIII. CHAPTER 28…………………………………………………………269 XXIX. CHAPTER 29………………………………………….…………………..275 XXX. CHAPTER 30……………………………………….………………….….284 XXXI. CHAPTER 31………………………………………………………………287 XXXII. CHAPTER 32…………………………………………………….……298 XXXIII. CHAPTER 33…………………………………………………………..301 XXXIV. CHAPTER 34…………………………………………………………..304 XXXV. CHAPTER 35………………………………………….………………306 XXXVI. CHAPTER 36…………………………………………………………..328 XXXVII. CHAPTER 37…………………………………………………………..338 iv XXXVIII. CHAPTER 38…………………………………………………………..341 XXXIX. CHAPTER 39……………………………………………………....…..346 XL. CHAPTER 40………………………………………………………..……..355 XLI. CHAPTER 41………………………………………………...…………….366 XLII. CHAPTER 42………………………………………………...…………….372 XLIII. CHAPTER 43………………………………………………...…………….377 XLIV. CHAPTER 44………………………………………………...…………….380 XLV. CHAPTER 45………………………………………………...…………….385 XLVI. CHAPTER 46………………………………………………...…………….387 XLVII. CHAPTER 47………………………………………………...……………401 XLVIII. CHAPTER 48……………………………...…………………...………407 XLIX. CHAPTER 49………………………………………………...…………….413 L. CHAPTER 50………………………………………………...………………...423 LI. CHAPTER 51………………………………………………...…………...……425 LII. CHAPTER 52………………………………………………...…………….429 LIII. CHAPTER 53………………………………………………...…………….435 WORKS CITED………………..………………………………………………………436 APPENDIX 1. MILTIARY LOYALTY: HITLER’S NAZI GERMANY AND EMPEROR TRACT’S NGE…………………………………………………………………439 v 2. POLITICAL DISCOURSE, DICTION, AND RESULTING IMAGE……..….442 3. PTSD, TRAUMA, AND REALISTIC CHARACTER REACTIONS…………447 vi PREFACE AND AKNOWLEDGMENTS Mirror to the Future started as little more than a project that I did in my spare time for amusement. It went through countless transformations since its inception, but one element always remained: it was imperfect. What I can now call I novel I initially struggled to even call a story. The characters were shallow, the plot confusing and incomplete, and the chance that any person who read it would desire to read a sequel was slim to none. Entering into my sophomore year at Kent State, I saw this story as a project that would never be completed, a story that never really held any hope of being shared outside the confines of my family. Just as I was willing to put the fledgling novel on bookshelf in my home somewhere where it would never be read again, I was introduced to the Senior Honors Thesis project option offered at Kent State by my academic advisor, Dr. Kimberly Winnebrenner. Dr. Winnebrenner suggested that my novel could make a substantial English Honors Thesis, if it was given the proper effort, and it wasn’t long after that I sat in Professor Dauterich’s office with a stack of papers and a vague idea of how we could make this shabby story work. I knew that if this book would ever truly meet my standards for academic excellence that it would need to be reconstructed in a drastic matter. I knew that I needed to become unattached to the novel if I was to truly mold it into something real. I could vii not afford to be afraid to take entire chapters that I had spent hours of my life on, and cast them into the garbage. This book was going to need a full overhaul if it was ever going to stand alone as a novel. Writing a novel is one thing, but using it as an academic work worthy of 10 credit hours at a university was another. By my standards, this novel had to be more than simple a fictional work, created and edited to provide the reader with an enjoyable experience, but it also had to be an academic work, a work that showed that I had put the same hours of strenuous research into it that other students put into their thesis works in the fields of science, language, and technologies. When I started editing A Mirror to the Future with Professor Dauterich, I made it very clear that not only was I writing a novel, but also a top-notch piece of academic literature. During my four thesis semesters, I read the works of Adolf Hitler, and first-hand accounts of people living and working in Nazi Germany. I also read psychological articles on post-traumatic-stress-disorder, and violence; I was determined to turn the dictatorial society pictured in my novel into a living, breathing, plausible world, that was not unlike regimes experienced in our world, the real world. I researched psychology to make my character’s minds real. I gave my characters back-stories that would never find their way into the text simply to make them a real person in my head sot that when I viii wrote of them on paper, I was recalling as opposed to creating. I wanted the world they lived in along with their personalities to be as real to my readers as they were to me. By the time it was all said and done, my story had been edited thoroughly four times by Professor Dauterich and myself. What was originally 257 pages grew to 434, what was 24 chapters became 52. I sought with this work to revolutionize what could be considered an Honors Thesis Novel. I started this project with a novel, and I ended it with a thesis: a culmination of all of my work here at Kent State, a project fit to sit on the bookshelf in the Honors College, all from a book that never looked as if it would be more than a few hundred pages written by an imaginative student. ix CHAPTER 1 PROLOGUE As the smoke clears in Paris, the once proud city gasps for air. The ground is strewn with the remains of colossal buildings; the streets that were bustling with traffic only hours ago are littered with the burnt frames of cars and the shards of shattered windshields. The piercing sounds of women shrieking and the cataclysmic rumble of buildings falling are gone, replaced by a painful, eerie silence. 1 CHAPTER 2 The steel city nears the end of its metamorphosis from night into placid morn. Manmade light passes through the windows of vacant skyscrapers, puncturing the darkness, giving shape to the black void of night. Cars hum as they traverse the lonely bridges, crossing the rippling water which shimmers under the glow of the crescent moon. Brown eyes study the city through strands of wiry hair. Their gaze dances up the silhouettes of buildings to their spires, glides back down their sides and on through the streets. They stop to marvel at the shadowed giants in the distance and the little lights scattered about them like stars in the night sky. In its vastness, it was humbling. In its stillness, it was soothing. But a painting is merely canvas to the observer whose eyes are closed; and so it was the same for Ray, whose thoughts clouded the magnificence of the view from his apartment and limited the daunting landscape to the spectrum of his mind. The apartments were erected on the crest of one of the many hills overlooking the city. Ray and his caretaker, Charlie, had moved here from the suburbs when their previous landlord had evicted them for missing payments. Ray was a junior in high school at the time of this forced migration, and he had fought voraciously to remain in his school for his senior year. Ray was used to the fight; he had fought for everything he had: for his friends, for his grades, even for his caretaker, who was nearly strangled by alcohol’s noose following the death of his best friend and 2 the acquisition of his thirteen-year-old son. Ray knew what his responsibilities were, and as a result labeled normal teenaged excitement as frivolous and asinine. Why go to the movies when there were chores to be done? Cars are dangerous without the added distraction of rowdy passengers and blaring music; why risk becoming a statistic smeared on the pavement when your legs work just fine to get you where you have to go? Ray went to school, worked his part-time job at Henry’s, a deli in Pittsburgh’s strip district not far from his school, and that was about it. His friends labeled him as boring, and criticized him for always being busy, but he couldn’t care less; at least he had friends. As Ray