In this psychological novella, which is seemingly a concatenation of short stories, Kevin Boileau explores the topic of ontological violence. This is an attitude toward the ruptures we experience as human beings, both by choice and by the hand of others; yet, the attitude is aggressive, a choice of being in the face of change as project forward to our physical deaths. It is in the condition of existential uncertainty that we are most called upon to take responsibility for our new choices, and it these choices that Boileau carefully examines. Ontological violence is viewed, thus, as an aperture in the interstitial corridor between the past and the future as counter-memory.

In this oblique continuation of his earlier work, The Patient, Boileau pushes our conceptions of the self even further than before through the exercise of semantic irony and oblique parrhesia. Through mnemotechnics, Boileau displaces our normal conceptions of temporality and theodicy, giving us another minimalist novella that strains our bourgeois sentiments and awakens us like black coffee. It is anti-Balzacian and yet very much not so. Couragio

This minimalist novella explores important existential themes including father-son relationships, mortality, choice, uncertainty, and death. It is the companion to The Separation, and promises intriguing, thought-provoking questions about human experience.

This is another volume in a series of works about the human condition by Dr. Kevin Boileau. It is phenomenological in the tradition of Hemingway and Kafka, simultaneously tragic and joyous. It is moral in tone and psychoanalytic in structure, presenting the story of a character both distraught and resolved, sedimented and transcendent. It is best read along with its companion volume, The Return, which presents a gestalt inversion of our normal, conventional lifeworlds. Both are replete with phenomenological-ontological descriptions of dying and transformation.