Incomplete Pictures

Incomplete Pictures is an experimental novel that explores epistemology and metaphysics, particularly in relation to Buddhist philosophy, existentialism, and avant-garde literature. At the outset of the novel, Cornelius Baker-Smith finds himself reborn into the world and possesses the ability to remember past lives. Through these memories, which are closely connected to dreams, he is able to deduce that the world he inhabits is a façade that conceals an inexpressible truth. Cornelius becomes torn between personal enlightenment and the potential for the liberation of all beings. As the bardo state dissipates and its formlessness gives way to form, our narrator finds himself in an increasingly strange and uncompromising world. This sense of the strange and absurd opens the text to philosophical questioning of its own inherent and fundamental assumptions.