That One Escalator (Sasha)

In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime , the Father accompanies Peary on his polar expedition. But why does Doctorow have a random businessman in the patriotism industry accompany Peary to the North Pole? Is it, like the appearance of Houdini in the car, a way to show that Doctorow can do whatever he wants with history? Or is there more to it than that? For one thing, Father obviously comes back from the expedition seriously changed. His family notices radical differences in his character when he returns, and he himself does as well. As we see these changes, Doctorow also begins putting us into Father’s perspective more and more. His begins to replace the varied perspectives we get earlier in the novel. As we go on, more and more chapters are from his perspective, and from the perspective that he represents. Father begins thinking more and more about himself: about the fact that he has not taken his son to a ballgame, about how he thinks of his place in the world. His perspective, wh...

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

At the end of The White Boy Shuffle , Gunnar discovers the existence of a third atomic bomb meant for use against Japan. This bomb, codenamed Svelte Guy, was ultimately stored in the basement of the Smithsonian, from which Gunnar encourages its deployment against Hillside, obliterating the neighborhood and the thousands who have come to die there. The US government agrees to this obliteration, and the residents of hillside begin painting targeting circles on their roofs.   With this, The White Boy Shuffle reaches perhaps the peak of its absurdist, biting criticism of American society. The government is willing to deploy weapons last used in the largest war the world has ever seen against an angry and depressed civilian population. The weapon which it plans to deploy, and which Gunnar tries to convince it to use, was one built for use against Japan 50 years earlier, while Gunnar reads ever more Japanese suicide literature. Hillside and all those who come there are so ...

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...

       Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God has 3 primary community settings: Janie’s hometown, Eatonville, and the Muck. Janie’s independence and self-realization is closely tied to her engagement in these communities, which increases over the course of the novel. In Janie’s hometown, we learn almost nothing about the wider community. We know that Janie was raised in close proximity to the single white family, which we know may have isolated her to some degree from the rest of the town. We also know that a major party was thrown for the town when she and Logan were married. Other than that, however, we know essentially nothing about the community. After her encounter with Taylor, one of only a few named characters in the early chapters, Janie is shipped off to Logan, who lives far away from the rest of the town, and does not interact with his neighbors much if it all. Janie, as we know, quickly runs away with Jody, and settles in Eatonville,...

        I’m back with yet another Invisible Man blog post. Why have I not written on any other book? Not really sure. But, this is a topic that I’ve been wanting to do a blog post or essay about for a while now, because it was extremely noticeable and interesting for me, but never figured out how to turn into a coherent longer form argument. I’m here to talk about clothes in Invisible Man , and their relation to the characters we see and the story overall. As stated in the documentary we watched, Ellison himself paid very close attention to his clothes, and dressed in a very particular, “Ivy” manner. That Ellison paid careful attention to formal clothing is quite apparent throughout Invisible Man , and Ellison repeatedly uses the narrator’s changes of clothes, as well as the clothes of those around him, to send messages about the character’s state and current role in society.   The first mention of clothing in the novel comes during the Battle R...

To me, in all honesty, Invisible Man still has a strangely and profoundly dreamlike character. Our main character continually tries to establish himself, but is undercut in bizarre and nonsensical ways throughout, while even his attempts to slip away from the world provoke strange responses.   The narrator’s experience with the brotherhood exemplify this pattern extremely clearly. He is promoted to a high office in an organization he does not really understand (nor ever understands or is allowed to understand) and is then repeatedly criticized and shamed for failing to uphold the proper ideals of said organization. Only after one such failure for which he is criticized is he sent to Hambro, to be educated, but we, like with his college experience, see none of this. We learn only that he is successful enough in his education to be given his job back, followed by it being taken away again, and him reassigned to “The Woman Question”. This chapter too, is bizarre. We are...