Everything from here on is History as Fiction

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tateh’s “Transformation”?

The Tateh we see by the end of Ragtime appears to be a very different man from how he was when Evelyn Nesbit visited him and his daughter in the Lower East Side. As readers, we are supposed to think that Tateh has overcome all his misfortunes, and that he is one of the few cases of a character having a “good ending” in Ragtime . In fact, it seems almost silly to question whether he has truly changed, for his personality seems to have taken a complete 180 and his appearance is completely unrecognizable. Consider page 254, where we are introduced to Tateh, now known as the “Baron Ashkenazy,” who is described as a “small, limber man who wore jodhpurs and a white silk shirt open at the neck” with “shining black hair”. Compared to when we first saw him as a “frail” and “white-haired” man, he has fundamentally altered himself, at least physically (48). However, these actions that he had taken to transform himself are by definition surface level, and essentially act as a coverup for what he t...
Read more

Ruby’s View on the Conspiracy

While we may never know what the real Jack Ruby thought of Oswald and assassination as a whole, DeLillo portrays Jack Ruby as an overly patriotic man who despises Oswald, viewing him as a “complete nothing, a zero person in a T-shirt” (DeLillo 421). Ironically, Ruby is known to history solely as a player part of the Oswald conspiracy, and for DeLillo’s Ruby, this association to Oswald leaves him in a difficult mental state. DeLillo offers the reader some of Ruby’s thoughts while in jail, and we see how the conspiracy has taken over his mind completely, reaching a point where he views himself and Oswald as one of the same. His thoughts also show how he simultaneously regrets killing Oswald, making references to Jews who will suffer because of this, and how he still feels a small bit of pride, by reading the telegrams of those who supported his killing of Oswald. Essentially, Ruby feels overwhelmed by the conspiracy like no one else in the book, by having his entire mental state deteri...
Read more

Reed’s Lampoons

As discussed in class, chapter 26 of Mumbo Jumbo has Reed go on a tangent of sorts, spending about a page discussing the objects on Abdul’s desk. While its inclusion in the story may seem random and not bearing any significance to the story, I found that it provides the reader with the tools to make a simple connection: while the white colonists are the subject of the African’s lampoons, the Wallflower Order, and really anyone of the white race in Mumbo Jumbo , act as Reed’s lampoons. This connection makes even more sense when you consider the book itself as a work of art, satirizing in the same manner as the Africans. In fact, Reed himself points out how the African race “had quite a sense of humor,” which was lacking in modern African-American works (Reed 96). It makes sense that Reed wants to use his book as a way to bring back the original African style of art, using irony and satire to make profound points, so he does so in Mumbo Jumbo by targeting the Wallflower Order, and to an...
Read more