Abstract
Jonathan has soft centers: he tends a garden, enjoys baking, crochets, collaborates on graphic novels and pop culture trivia with classmates. He enjoys long walks and watching people. Following the death of his mother, he is thrust into a world of hyper-masculinity. His father, a traveling civil engineer and in grief, leaves Jonathan and his younger brother Ikenna in the care of their older cousin, Chuka, and his friends. These men, in a new position of power over Jonathan, seek to remake him into a model man: straight, masculine, subservient to their pecking order. Jonathan is stubborn, insistent on a value in his queerness that is affirmed by the media he consumes and the internet. While he resists Chuka’s friends, his feelings grow complex once he starts to desire them sexually. As puberty begins, with an increasing sense of his alienation, Jonathan falls into the world of internet pornography, finding older men on Facebook and developing a physically- and psychically-painful masturbation addiction. Set in Nigeria and the internet space of the mid-2010s, Little Nights is an exploration of the internet's influence on the relationship between one's self and community, and the quest towards a meaningful life.
Committee Chair
Danielle Dutton
Committee Members
Kathryn Davis, Marshall Klimasewiski
Degree
Master of Fine Arts in Writing (MFAW)
Author's Department
English, Writing (The Writing Program)
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
Spring 5-12-2025
Language
English (en)
Recommended Citation
Emeka, David Iruoma, "Little Nights: A Novel" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3647.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3647