History As Fiction

Posts from this point forward will be for History As Fiction, Spring 2020

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The Men Without Skin

In Beloved , the central scene of the novel, Sethe’s killing of Beloved herself and her attempt to kill the rest of her children, is first narrated from the perspective of “the men without skin”, Schoolteacher, his nephew, the slave-catcher, and the sheriff. But why? Why change our perspective to that of a character completely isolated from everyone else, who believes our characters to be profoundly inferior and worth only what he can extract from them?   And then, why does this happen again at the end of the novel? Why does Morrison switch again to the perspective of a (very different) white character for the scene of Beloved’s disappearance? In both cases, the radical switch in perspective massively alienates the readers from the characters we have spent the rest of the book with. We are forced to see Schoolteacher’s thoughts from his perspective, forced immediately to understand why he makes the decision to abandon all of the children along with Sethe. This is i...
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Peter and Hugh in TSAR

        Peter Walsh, in Mrs. Dalloway , is one of the first post-War men. He would be, in The Sun Also Rises , “one of them”, alongside Jake and Brett. Peter Walsh is usually, like Jake, fairly judgmental. He also demonstrates a fairly developed since of humor throughout the story.  Hugh Whitbread, in particular, is the target of Peter Walsh, much like Cohn becomes the target of his fellows in The Sun Also Rises , and for essentially similar reasons. Peter criticizes Hugh for “having no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an English gentleman,”. The comment seems similar to what is regularly implied by the various characters in The Sun Also Rises about Cohn; that (in this case) Hugh is a relic of a past age. He does not understand the way in which the modern world works, and attempts to compensate for it by engaging in behaviors the other characters consider slightly or entirely ludicrous. Cohn constantly challenges people to fights fo...
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