"History as Fiction" enthusiast

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow tells a unique story about the Ragtime era. There is no main character, no antagonist, and a very confusing plot. Instead, it jumps about seemingly aimlessly at the beginning, emulating some kind of omnipotent camera zooming in on random people. Doctorow doesn't use names for fictional characters but does for real historical figures in the book (with the exception of Coalhouse Walker). Things get interesting when historical figures interact with fictional characters, because Doctorow writes Ragtime in the gaps of history, making it impossible to know whether these events really happened.  Although all the characters are seemingly disconnected, they end up all having some connection to each other by the end of the book. The Family of Mother, Father, and the Little Boy meet Houdini in a rare coincidence, who meets Harry K. Thaw, death row convict and estranged husband of Evelyn Nesbit, who has an affair with Mother's Younger Brother. Coalhouse Walker'...

  All subsequent posts from this blog will be for the class "History as fiction".

Benji's adventure of trying to get into the eighteen-only club is a classic teenage adventure in my opinion. Of course as a teenager I don't know what other adventures come after, but this is the kind I can relate to. As a teenager I've enjoyed pushing the boundaries and tip-toeing the line of what I can or can't do (or get away with), and I see that reflected here. But all the adventures I've had along these lines have been spontaneous-- I've never gone into the intense planning to pull off such an operation. Benji describes him and NP planning for days, weeks even, on how they'll pull it off. NP works on bribing the bouncer for a while, and Benji practices his adult persona (that one I can relate to).  In the end, they manage to get in without trouble, and Benji to this day remembers the incident as "a caper that didn't go wrong for once" (I can't find where, but I'm 99% sure he says this). It also signifies them having come of age to...

 I wrote this after reading the first two chapters of Black Swan Green. It is my first impression of Jason: Jason Taylor is a kid who cares very much about keeping up appearances, similarly to Bruce Bechdel in  Fun Home.  However, unlike how Bruce hid his homosexuality, stammering is the sort of thing that the harder you try to hide it, the more apparent it becomes. He refers to his condition as "Hangman", and has four commandments for it: "Thou shalt hide from speech therapists; Thou shalt strangle Taylor when he is nervous about stammering; Thou shalt ambush Taylor when he is not nervous about stammering; Once Taylor is 'Stutterboy' in the eyes of the world he is  yours " (31). He really wants to maintain his social status and that makes him anxious about his stammer, which makes it all the worse. I've experienced a similar sort of "mental echo chamber" where the more I think about a certain problem, the more it affects me. However, I've ...

    The story of Daedalus and Icarus goes that Daedalus, the genius inventor, crafted wings of feathers and wax so he and Icarus could escape Crete. However, Icarus grew cocky, flying so close to the sun that his wings melted and he fell to his death. In Fun Home, Bechdel makes a comparison of her and her father to Daedalus and Icarus, which I think is the perfect analogy. Throughout the novel she and her father embody both of these roles interchangeably, which I'll explore here.      At the beginning of the book, Bechdel illustrates her and her father playing a game of airplane, which she related to the Icarian games of the circus. She cryptically notes that, "In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky" (Bechdel 4). As they are playing airplane, her father is Daedalus and she is Icarus, but this statement implies the opposite. Her father would be the one to plummet from the sky, which c...

    Buddy Willard emotionally injures Esther when he tells her he is not a virgin, shattering Esther's image of him and her feelings for him. Esther claims she isn't bothered by that; it's the fact that he had pretended otherwise that bothered her. However at the time, it was expected that men would sleep around, and other girls at Esther's college told her that was perfectly normal. Perhaps Buddy didn't feel the need to tell her because of this. But Esther felt cheated, like Buddy had one-upped her, and she couldn't continue to be with him knowing that he wasn't a virgin. She couldn't "get even" because of the threat of pregnancy and worries about having to marry the wrong man. Also, the double standard that men could sleep around while women were expected to remain chaste greatly upset her.      Later in the novel Dr. Nolan prescribed birth control to Esther, which greatly helped Esther on her healing journey.  Esther tells Doctor Nolan that ...

     Holden is obsessed with not being "phony". He gets ticked off anytime he catches a whiff of phoniness, but he takes it so far that he feels surrounded by phonies. To not be a phony in Holden's eye leaves almost no room for being part of the adult world.      One thing that annoyed me is when Holden criticized Ernie for being too good at the piano. The way he described it, Ernie really did sound like a prick, but the idea that I didn't like was when he said "If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet" (84). He rejects the idea of being good at something to get attention from other people. As a pianist, I enjoy playing for myself as well, but I also like sharing what I've learned with my friends, and I don't like his view on that. It isn't wrong to want others to see what you've accomplished. Holden also dislikes the actors in the Lunts for being show-offy, saying, "If you do something too good, then, after a while...