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While Jayne Anne Phillips’s first collection of short stories received wide critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, her first novel fell short of fulfilling the expectations generated by this early work. The key to understanding the achievement of Black Tickets partially lies in Phillips’s subtle shifts from a minimalist prose to the surrealist depths of an otherwise incantatory mode of writing, a method of composition which she brought to near perfection in her second novel, Shelter. The following paper aims to throw light on the way Phillips actually uses certain aesthetic principles of de-composition to reflect the ethical quandary of a whole generation of Americans at a loss in a world of fluctuating identities and shifting values. She eventually undermines the traditional icons of American society through new modes of perception and representation which allow her to transfigure reality while seeking to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown.