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Kindred, and Butler's unique use of a common plot device

Time travel is a pretty common motif in popular media; however, where many texts or films will use time travel to take the protagonist on fun or lighthearted adventures, Kindred uses this plot device to examine the thought experiment of how modern day people would react when truly faced with the horrors of antebellum slavery. Time travel also works very differently in Kindred than in other pieces of media, with Dana being involuntarily transported back to the past whenever her distant ancestor, Rufus, is in danger. Dana is completely powerless as to when she is transported, and she also has no control over how long she stays, with her longest experiences possibly being upwards of a week. This process is very physically and mentally taxing on Dana; she never returns unscathed. Whether it be disorientation and exhaustion, or even physical injuries, like her lost arm. All of this is to say that in Kindred, time travel is especially harsh, and meant to reflect the brutality of slavery and ...
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Was Jes Grew always a virus?

Within the scope of the Mumbo Jumbo, Jes Grew most literally represents the growth of Jazz music and culture in America. Through explanation by PaPa LaBas, however, we learn that Jes Grew does not just apply to this singular instance of black culture rapidly going from underground to taking over the mainstream. Jes Grew is the explanation of this phenomenon within American popular culture as a cycle wherein the latest incarnation of Jes Grew emerges to strong opposition, but eventually gets more and more popular, until it has become so commercialized and diluted, that the real art returns to the underground until the cycle begins again.  In class we talked about how mainstream Jazz music started to become much more watered down when it was appropriated for a broader white audience. Innovations within the Jazz scene continued to be made which would have caused a stir in the Jes Grew’s height, but by this point, no one cared, because Jazz was already accepted. This is when Jes Grew d...
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The Nameless Family

The family of Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, and the Little Boy could arguably be considered the main characters of Ragtime . While many of the family members are less dynamic characters than someone like Coalhouse Walker, or JP Morgan, all of them stay present and central throughout the entire book. One of the most notable narrative decisions that Doctorow makes in Ragtime is leaving the main characters of the book without names. For a majority of my reading through the book, I was somewhat confused by this decision. Doctorow’s divide between who got a name and who didn’t also seemed kind of arbitrary; it didn’t have to do with who were real versus fictional characters, which is seen in the named and completely made up characters of Sarah, Willie Conklin, Coalhouse, and more. So, what was Doctorow’s intent in not giving any members of the family names, if not to distinguish his fictional characters from iconic historical figures of the early 20th century? I think that thes...
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ALL POSTS FROM NOW ON ARE FOR HISTORY AS FICTION

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Was this Benji's last summer coming out?

     As introduced in the beginning of the book, Sag Harbor is predominantly a vacation community, which is pretty much only populated during summer. Due to Benji and Reggie’s private school schedules, they get out of school a few days earlier than any of the other kids. Benji describes how empty the town is when they first arrive, and he introduces the concept in their community of “coming out”. In this case, the term is used to describe familiar families coming out to their vacation homes for the summer. This arrangement forms a tight knit community in which people, who are normally minorities as upper middle-class African-Americans back in New York create a kind of utopia for the summer. The community in Sag Harbor almost feels stagnant, frozen in time; filled with the same elders telling Benji stories about his grandparents, and acting simply as a backdrop to his own development. One especially interesting effect that the phenomenon of coming out has is how one can on...
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Madame Crommelynck as a turning point in Jason’s adolescence

My first impression of Jason Taylor was that he was very self conscious, and edited himself so much to others, to a point that no one really knew him (this is also similar to Holden and Esther). Jason really isn’t the “type” that all the other popular kids in his class are; he writes poetry, has nerdy interests, and has a stammer that he uses his extensive vocabulary to hide. Jason’s worst fear is that any of this humiliating information about him is revealed to his class, so he does all he can to hide it and fit in. Jason is so obsessed with the social politics of his grade and is desperate to move up from his current mid-ranked “position” in his class. He recognizes classmates, like Ross Wilcox, who didn’t used to be cool, and is bewildered by how they were able to move up. Jason begins taking any chance he can get to improve his social standing with the other kids, as well as keeping up the act of hiding his stammer and unpopular interests. One example of this is in “Bridle Path”, w...
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Icarus and Daedalus Reversing Roles

 The opening scene of Fun Home places Bruce on the floor of their living room, holding Alison in the air. Alison immediately compares her own height and danger of falling to the Greek myth of Icarus, the figure who–after his father, Daedalus’ invention–flew too close to the sun and fell into the Aegean sea. At the start of the book, Bruce is Daedalus, and Alison is Icarus. However, in Fun Home, Alison says that she isn’t the one who falls, but Bruce is. Bruce’s ‘fall’ can be interpreted in different ways, but I think the sequencing of the book attempts to show his fall as how her perspective of him shifts. At the beginning of the book, Bruce’s character is much simpler; we know that he’s a perfectionist, has a short temper, and is generally very cold to his family. Despite her best efforts, Alison struggles to find meaningful connection and interaction with her father. For so much of Alison’s childhood, and even up to the months before Bruce dies, Alison barely knows about him....
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