That One Escalator (Sasha)

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...

If Mumbo Jumbo is the story of the interaction between Jes Grew and the Wallflower Order of the Atenists in the first world, and we can see the flare-ups of Jes Grew across our own history, then we can also see ideas of Jes Grew and Atenism in what was known for portions of the 20th century as the second world: the Soviet Union, the Soviet-aligned Eastern bloc, and areas such as the former Yugoslavia. As a historical side note this is why we no longer really say second-world, the communist states of the second world no longer exist. So now we talk about the first world and the third and I’m sure most of us have wondered at some point what happened to the second one.   Ishmael Reed mentions in his novel his belief that Marx secularized the teachings of Jesus Christ. This strongly implies Marxism and Western communism in general, to be Atenist modes of thought, even if, like the battle between the Teutonic Order and the Knights Templar, these various branches of Atenist thought...

In both Doctorow’s Ragtime and Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo , Egypt appears to play an important role in our understanding of the main plot. Note: probably some slight spoilers for Mumbo Jumbo ahead, as, while the pieces are all there, the book hasn’t put it together for us yet.   In Ragtime , Egypt is the ultimate destination of J.P. Morgan, where he seeks to find proof of the reincarnation of the fittest, and potentially a secret society of others who understand their power in this world. Morgan sleeps overnight in a pyramid alongside the long-dead Pharaohs, attempting to establish a connection between himself and them.   Ragtime also points out a wider trend towards Egyptology in the early 1900s, an obsession with Egypt and the rediscovery of that part of the Ancient World. The family gets Egypt-themed wallpaper, and so on.   In Mumbo Jumbo , we know that at least one secret society really does exist, the Wallflower Order. We also know that they too are ...

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...