Alienation

Through her science-fictional narrative realm, the author creates a commentary on the ways in which society marginalizes and alienates individuals with physical and mental atypicalities. In the world of "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," children conceived by parents treated with "the magic bullet," or "the cure for a large percentage of the world's cancer and a number of serious viral diseases," are born with Duryea-Gode disease (406). Individuals living with DGD have a proclivity towards suicide, murder, or self-mutilation. Though DGDs like Lynn, her parents, her classmates, and Alan are capable of living nominally normal lives for a time, their condition inevitably overtakes their ability to function as supposedly productive members of society. The author uses her invented disorder as a symbolic representation of other mental illnesses or anomalies. In "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," people living with DGD are tormented...