Jackrabbit

Abstract

A creative dissertation, Jackrabbit is a novel narrated by three different women who each separately experience love and hardship, then subsequently learn to think and act for herself. These women and their stories are connected by the land they all share—for variance of periods and in somewhat different years—in western Kansas, their experiences, and the phenomena of jackrabbit roundups during the Great Depression. Greta, whose story takes place mostly during 1934, begins the book. Although she is very much a woman, she is only now discovering her sexuality. The situation in which she does so is in hunger and general want. Nella’s tale takes place in 1947. It is not hunger that drives Nella, but the desire to overcome oppression and expectations. Sissily’s sections are set primarily in 1966. Sissily is only in Kansas briefly, but her time there is no less significant than Greta and Nella’s.