The Nicholas Digby Account

Author:

Kach, Jennifer Leigh

Area of Honors:

English

Degree:

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type:

Thesis

Thesis Supervisors:

William James Cobb, Thesis Supervisor
Lisa Ruth Sternlieb, Thesis Honors Advisor
Charles Waters Thompson Jr., Faculty Reader

Keywords:

Fiction
British Literature
Metafiction

Abstract:

The Nicholas Digby Account is…well, how could one categorize it? It is, of course, the story of Mr. Nicholas Digby, a New York City bookseller and intense Anglophile who becomes, as Charles Dickens terms it, an “uncommercial traveler.” Mr. Digby spends his time telling “you” about his strange affliction—he has begun waking up inside the various literary worlds in which he has so immersed himself in the past. His meetings with Sherlock Holmes, Hank Morgan of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Basil Hallward of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and, finally, with his own doppelganger lead him to a frantic questioning of the nature of literature, free will, and reality itself. The Nicholas Digby Account is, at once, a series of found documents, a transcribed (and edited?) interview, a novella, a story of one man’s grappling with reality. And if it seems to complicate that reality, then, well, perfect. The account is presented to the reader so that he or she may consider his or her own place in the world and in the grand scheme of fate, or destiny, or whatever may propel life. It offers up some potential theories, but, ultimately, is meant to heighten the reader’s awareness that there is nothing, not even reality, that is entirely what it seems. After all, Nicholas Digby may not even be the most reliable teller of his own life story.