Potential Selves

Throughout her stories, Corin continually draws attention to the idea that individuals are in the process of becoming: they meet potential versions of themselves in everyone they encounter. Throughout the stories, narrators and protagonists encounter "potential selves," or people they could become, given enough time. In "Madmen," the narrator is told that she too "could grow up to be a madman," thus encountering a potential self in every madman she meets (28). In "Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster," Patrick has an "adult" conversation with Sara, which "freaks him out for a second," for he realizes he could potentially be an adult (which, by the end of the story, he is) (60). Throughout her vignettes in "A Hundred Apocalypses," narrators and protagonists meet their potential selves in various ways: in "Hangings," the protagonist wears a dead man's clothes, thus framing the dead man as his own potential self...