Abstract

Dear Ruth is an epistolary novel about two young women and the earth. Christine is a bright, moody Anglo-American woman who discovers that her best friend and lover, Ruth, who is part Mohave, is also her half-sister. This discovery haunts Christine, who flees her primordial home in the beautiful high mesa country of New Mexico and goes to California. Having left her world behind--the world of Ruth--she becomes an ontological outsider. The new world is not her own but a place that is mythically no place. It is at this moment separation that Christine become a modern character. Excluded from the mythic home-world, she must either find a way to return, if that is possible, create or discover a new mythic world, or live as an ontological outsider. ;The novel has two parts. The first part contains the letters that Christine has written to Ruth. The second part contains unauthorized commentaries on the first part. Either part can be read first. If the reader reads the second part first, she will find that reality--here the character of Christine--is revealed indirectly through another consciousness. The commentaries are all that the reader requires if what the reader seeks is consciousness in the modern world pondering the bits and pieces of experience. This is really the postmodern experience. ;However, if the reader is a modern, she will still be interested in the truth. And as a seeker of the truth she will want to get as close to it as possible. The letters will get her a little closer. They will reveal Christine's words to the reader, and using those words as a kind of evidence, the reader can construct a portrait of Christine. In other words, the reader can create her own commentaries