Content area
This project addresses a critical gap by treating the novella’s allegorical naming system as the mechanism through which the text disorients moral inquiry. Names in Chronicle do not clarify identity or stabilize character. They circulate within a semiotic structure that invokes religious and mythological referents while undermining the authority of those referents to deliver truth. In reading the names as both archetypal signals and instruments of narrative fracture, this thesis shows that the novella reframes the instability of truth as the consequence of meaning systems that collapse under interpretive pressure. What emerges is a confrontation with the conditions that make truth legible or illegible. Here, archetypes do more than collapse. They come together to organize the illusion that nothing can be known. The novel demands that the reader ask whether this illusion is part of the structure of power it seeks to expose, and whether they should ever truly trust that which appears to be true, to be truth.