These sketches and stories are the result of moods, daydreams, and experiences. The collection progresses from those intimate stories controlled by personal experience to the last two works which try to crystallize a mood or experience in a medium without the device of first person. "Grandpa," "Great-Grandpa," and "Weedgod" are sketches which describe the boundary between what things are and what things seem to be. "Aunt Mary," "Hospital," and "Eggy Cooter" are short stories presenting situations in which the reader can determine this boundary line himself.

This thesis examines existing theories of Spanish stress assignment in generative phonology and proposes an alternative theory that is more effective in predicting the surface representations of Spanish stress. Stress is characterized according to traditional textbook standards and examples are given (Chapter I). The current theoretical setting, especially the theories of James W. Harris, is then described (Chapter II). This writer's own theory, based upon an underlying distinction between tense and lax vowels, is delineated (Chapter III) and defended (Chapter IV). The new stress assignment rule--along with a rule of vowel laxing before a word boundary (#) and a rule of stress adjustment--shows stress in Spanish to be predictable and, therefore, not phonemic.

The protagonist of each of these stories has the same problem. Without really willing it, he finds himself involved with people whom he really does not like. These people have little regard for his individuality or for his welfare because they are so immersed in their own worlds that they cannot imagine anyone existing outside them. In both stories the protagonist realizes finally that he is being dragged into these worlds against his will. More importantly, both characters realize that passive resistance will not work, that they must resist actively if they are to retain personal dignity and their very identities. Sammy, in "A Cimmerian Holiday," rejects the Ashburns' world by walking away; Andy, in "Darkling I Listen," repudiates the various worlds of his acquaintances by withdrawing into the solitary world of books and music.

This study emphasizes the private and public struggles of the common man as portrayed in two representative plays by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Price, and two by Thornton Wilder, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. These plays demonstrate man's struggle because of failures in responsibility toward self and family and because of his inability to fully appreciate life. Miller concentrates on the pathetic part of Man's nature, caused by a breakdown in human communication. Wilder, however, focuses on the resilient part which allows man to overcome natural disasters and moral transgressions. The timelessness of man's conflict explains the motivations of symbolic character types in these plays and reveals a marked applicability to all average citizens in American society.