Epigraphs are like little appetizers to the great entrée of a story. They illuminate important aspects of the story, and they get us headed in the right direction.
I am the name of the sound/and the sound of a name. I am the sign of the letter/and the designation of the division.
"Thunder, Perfect Mind,"
The Nag Hammadi
What's up with the epigraph?
Okay, so this is an excerpt from a Gnostic poem discovered in 1945. What is Gnosticism, you ask? It's an early Christian practice that stated that, in order to obtain spiritual freedom, you needed to shun the material world and embrace the spiritual world. This sounds like something Alice would like, if you ask us.
In this poem, an unnamed narrator speaks in a series of paradoxical statements that shift between statements of identity and addresses to the reader. Hmm, does that sound like Jazz to you, too? An unnamed narrator? The paradoxical nature of identity? Various narrative techniques? A text that is confusing and beautiful and interested in spiritual renewal? Yeah, we think this makes a pretty spot-on epigraph.