Abstract
The Sun’s Circuit follows a temporarily unnamed young man as he tries to navigate the worlds of drug addiction, incarceration, institutionalization, and homelessness. It is written, mostly, in the first person, save for the first section, which dips into a sort of second (which is still kind of first). The primary tension of the text is epistemological. This tension is between a solipsistic, static searching for self-knowledge (as exemplified through scientific and pseudo-scientific understandings of addiction and mental illness) vs. a more outward facing, social, and totalized movement through life (developed through relationships, nature, and art). Time serves as a method of control for the narrator. By freezing memories and isolating incidents, he is able to put his life under a microscope, so to speak, but this method doesn’t ever satisfy him or teach him much about himself, and he is not very good at it. Divorcing these memories and phenomena from context and progressive narrative (as he, himself, is isolated and stuck in a cycle) causes him to “miss the forest for the trees.” Most of his relationships throughout the text are vertical. Therapists, institutions, and authority figures deliver competing methods of self-understanding to him. This gets intentionally muddled, confusing, and often humorous, as he tries to find a thread. The Sun’s Circuit is, at its core, about a consciousness understanding itself.