Split Shadows

Abstract

This article explores a father–son relationship and the death of the author’s father through mythically framed autoethnographic stories. The author confronts persistent anxieties that haunt him, as he struggles with his initiation into “maturity,” an initiation that began with his father’s death and continues today—fifteen years later. By juxtaposing intimate stories of his father with classic, archetypal exigencies of the human quest for meaning in a troubled, limited world, the author seeks to open up multiple layers of possibilities: personal and collective, autoethnographic and mythic, comic and tragic, masculine and feminine. This piece is a tribute to the author’s father and their love that also explores shadowy, unconscious complexities. The author finds wisdom and insight in reclaiming and recasting an ancient, archetypal orientation to myth in the interdisciplinary world of qualitative inquiry. Simultaneously, through crafting a myth of a fallen hero/trickster, the author embraces the transformational process of facing his personal splits while suggesting possibilities for mending splits that still frame and divide our world today.