Food of the Gods

Abstract

The thesis is a short novel, Food of the Gods, followed by a critical afterward and bibliography.In Food, four graduate students, all to varying degrees perverse, come together in a cabalistic union. Bored and desperate, they begin to transgress a series of taboos, eventually performing communal acts of aggression, murder, and even cannibalism. Frank West, one of the students, is the novel's narrator and questionable moral center. It is through his confession that the four's "monstrous deeds" are filtered through.Thematically, Food examines the potential for evil in individuals, as well as the group dynamics which encourage such acts of violence to erupt.The required critical afterward looks at cannibalism as a literary trope in Food and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, discussing how the athropophagous act can be read as a symbolic one, simultaneously creating and destroying boundaries between various dichotomies (such as eater/eaten or self/other) related to notions of identity