History As Fiction

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

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Kindred

At the end of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred , Dana is permanently crippled by a touch from Rufus Wainright. While Rufus has hurt Dana before, his grabbing of her arm at the end of the novel is the first time that Dana comes to severe harm as a result of her time travel. She had been concerned about other potential forms of harm, but always either caused by the need for fear-of-death to remove her from the 1800s, or caused by the dizziness associated with her trips into the past. She did have concerns about the possibility of momentum-transfer from being in a car while going back to the past, but, while similar to what happens to her with Rufus, the effect is not entirely the same.   When she returns to 1976, her arm is physically merged into a wall in that time, a wall which obviously did not exist in the 1800s. Unlike the potential for momentum transfer, Dana was not near a wall in a way which could’ve caused the injury. Instead, it is Rufus’ attempt to hold her back, and th...
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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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So It Goes?

As you might have guessed if I’m in your English class, I’ve found Slaughterhouse Five a fairly frustrating book. Not because of its structure, which, while odd, isn’t too difficult to read, but, fundamentally because I disagree with what feels like the ultimate message of the book. Not the anti-war message, though I have comments on that as well, but instead what Vonnegut writes every time we observe someone die, what Billy says the Tralfamadorians taught him to believe: “so it goes”.   So it goes? Is that really all we can hope for out of this world? That there’s nothing we can ever attempt to do to change the world, that if something ultimately does get better it’ll just have been fated to be? What sort of anti-war novel is that, where even the Tralfamadorians, when asked, reveal that, in fact, with their perfect views of the future and the past, they have wars more terrible than anything we have ever seen here on Earth, and that there is no purpose to even attempting to p...
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