The idea of “beating back the past” creates an important and symbolic theme within the book. This notion can be seen through many of the characters; however, Morrison highlights this idea by slowly revealing parts of Paul D’s life that depict a crucial part of the story. Paul D beats back the past and buries it “where it belonged in that tobacco tin in his chest where a red heart used to be” (Morrison 86). The black tobacco is the abstract form of the past that seeks to come out, and the red heart within his chest becomes tainted as each day passes and the past locks itself further into his body. One of the reasons the past is treated as such as cancer is because it brings back the memories of the monotonous life slaves had on the plantations;
Specifically the events that happened during “breakfast.” Paul D’s experience with breakfast is not the typical eggs and grits, but it is the sexual arousal the guards received from the slaves. Morrison descriptively showed Paul D’s happenstance with breakfast. Paul D felt so uncomfortable during breakfast, causing him to vomit on the guard and skipping his turn. Eventually, Paul D was lucky enough to escape and receive real breakfast. Moreover, this is a key example that highlights the theme of loss and renewal.
...he past, but Douglass and Precious can use their connections with the past as means to avoid its mistakes. So all three find a personal use for what once was reality as a promise for a more fulfilling reality in the future. And in a certain sense, all three find emancipation through their disparate relationships with literacy.
D'Aguiar's central purpose is to make us reflect upon American society during the slavery era and to acknowledge its realities so that we understand the capability for evil that exists in society. D'Aguair has used Whitechapel and his memories to encapsulate the brutality and inhumanity of slavery. The succeeding narratives further our understanding of the society and these are presented in a manner that forces the reader to accept D'Aguiar's judgements. The characters represent all of the voices of the society including people from different races, social status's and both genders so that the reader can see the position society imposed upon all citizens. The forms of the individual narratives help us to understand the reality of society because they allow the characters to emerge as individuals, telling their own stories with undisguised honesty. The Longest Memory is told from the oldest to the youngest character showing how society instilled its ideals on each generation in an uncompromising manner and so the stories overlap and intertwine, to illustrate this D'Aguiar has used an overwhelming tone of sadness and despair to emphasise the negative feelings that society created.
Yasmin works at St. Peter’s Hospital in the laundry room. The dirty sheets that she washes are symbolic of this idea that the past is inescapable. For instance, Yasmin says, “I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets… a lot of times the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper” (55). Through this symbolic representation, the author suggests the idea that the past is embedded in one’s life in the same way that the stains are embedded in the linens. With this symbolic representation, Diaz also reveals that the past is difficult to erase even after great effort, in this case, the special hamper which “gets incinerated” (55). The symbolic representation of the sheets is further emphasized when Diaz writes, “I hold up the blue hospital sheets in front of me and close my eyes, but the bloodstains float in the darkness in front of me” (67). This phrase addresses a different perspective of the overall idea that the past in inescapable. In this example, we are led to bel...
While travelling to and from the south, Kevin often tries to understand and empathize with Dana. In the book Scenes of Subjection, written by Saidiya Hartman, she writes, “yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankins’ efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself…” (19). Rankins is s white man whom appears to be in a similar situation as Kevin. While understanding and trying to feel what slaves feel, he goes beyond and starts feeling sorry for himself. I believe Kevin discovers he has the same problem: he tries to empathize with Dana and as a result feels sorry for himself. Time travel brings the situation to light by allowing Dana to be subjected to the role of a slave. Despite Kevin unconsciously empathizing with himself, he never stops his worry for Dana. Upon Dana’s return to modern days, Kevin tells her, “‘But in all my travelling, do you know the only time I ever felt relieved and eager to be going to a place?’... ‘it was when you went back to Maryland, when you visited the weylins to see whether I was there.’” (192). Kevin constantly worries about Dana even though he was stuck in a time where whites treat blacks as though they are objects. He always shows his love for Dana, which for the time he was in is extraordinary. While the antebellum south changes their views on life, it rarely changes their views of each
Paul D.'s escape from Alfred, Georgia was directly helped and represented by the rain that had fallen in the past weeks. Paul D. was sent to Alfred, George because he tried to kill Brandywine, his master after the schoolteacher. In Alfred, he worked on a chain gang with forty-five other captured slaves. They worked all day long with "the best hand-forged chain in Georgia" threading them together. They slept in a cell dug out of the earth. A man's breaking point was challenged everyday. It was hell for Paul D. Then it rained. Water gave Paul D. his freedom. The rain raised the water level in the in-ground cell so they could dive, "down through the mud under the bars, blind groping," in search of the other side (p. 110). One by one each of the forty-s...
In the novel, Paul D describes his heart as a tin box. He has locked away his painful memories from Sweet Home and the prison camp. Paul D represses his feelings in hopes of avoiding further hurt. When Paul D witnesses the strong love Sethe has for Denver and the attachment she has to Beloved, he thinks Sethe is making a dangerous mistake:
Every slave had a being, purpose and an ordinary lifestyle before they were hauled away from their lives with no explanation and lobbed into slavery, which was what Dana had experienced when she was hauled from her own life suddenly to aid her white predecessor whenever it suited him. Dana’s return to her own time also has a metaphorical symbolism related to slavery as it required her life to be at risk before she could return to ‘home’, present day. That could be connected to slavery and other historical events that we study today, as those situations also had to be brought to the brink of population demise, before anything was done to aid the situation. Time travel is usually associated with dominance, for someone to gain power but for Dana it is about overcoming dominance not getting it. When Dana witnesses life on the plantation first-hand, she gains a new historical context that she could not have gained from texts alone. Dana returns home with emotional and physical scars at the end of her journey as she had seen much more than anyone else from her time by participating in forebear’s lives. She gains a new perspective of history and the present day, and with that gains the ability to accept the past. Dana is no doubt the main character in this novel as it all has to do with her understanding and heredity of the past, but she is also a protagonist in the sense that she was faced with various obstacles such as her race; sexuality and age but yet she surmounted all the hindrances and accomplished what she was meant to do in formidable
The scars on Sethe’s back serve as another testament to her disfiguring and dehumanizing years as a slave. Like the ghost, the scars also work as a metaphor for the way that past tragedies affect us psychologically, “haunting” or “scarring” us for life. More specifically, the tree shape formed by the scars might symbolize Sethe’s incomplete family tree. It could also symbolize the burden of existence itself, through an allusion to the “tree of knowledge” from which Adam and Eve ate, initiating their mortality and suffering. Sethe’s “tree” may also offer insight into the empowering abilities of interpretation. In the same way that the white men are able to justify and increase their power over the slaves by “studying” and interpreting them according to their own whims, Amy’s interpretation of Sethe’s mass of ugly scars as a “chokecherry tree” transforms a story of pain and oppression into one of survival.
In conclusion, by viewing the motifs of pain, struggle, and the search for equality both in Moody’s novel and the songs by Johnny Cash and Nas, we see how the today and yesterday are intertwined. Although we may have come a long way from slavery to civil rights to modern day, these authors want to remind us that we still have a long way to go.
Throughout the novel the men of the Compson family are concerned with time in varying ways. How they deal with this seems to dominate their lives and the plot of the novel. Each of the three men in the newest generation of the family, Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason all struggle against it and this leads to the ultimate destruction of the family. While the obsession varies between these men in both style and severity, it does lead these men down the paths that they take. Benjy is a slave to time and the past. Quentin is obsessed with it and cannot move on. Jason is completely unable or unwilling to see it and learn from it. The family is ultimately doomed far before the beginning of the narrative as this story is told very much in the form of flashbacks or broken narratives. It takes time lines and very close reading to string together the past events from the present. In some points the narrative breaks down completely to what appears to be just random thoughts. Also due to the fact that the only third person narrative exists in the final section, the reader may not be inclined to believe most of what Quentin or Jason may be saying. The two most trustworthy characters are Dilsey who is a single step above a slave and Benjy who has a major mental deficiency. These flashbacks that may not be entire truths make the novel what it is though. As Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.
Who decides that being different is a trait to be looked down upon? In the late 19th century, it was the English Parliament with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, specifically outlawing all forms of male homosexual expression. This law, combined with the already negative attitude surrounding the gay community before and after World War I, implied that homosexuality was something to be ridiculed and scorned. This trend unfortunately continues yet over a century later. Pat Baker's Regeneration, starting on page 54 and continuing throughout the novel, repeatedly uses a non-fictional character, Siegfried Sassoon, to exhibit the unnecessary hurt that homosexuals experienced throughout history, an angle that was often neglected when homosexuals were discussed one hundred years ago. Regeneration displays the conflict that many homosexuals are tormented by when deciding whether to live for themselves and their personal needs or whether to conform in order to blend in with society.
In Chronicle of Death Foretold, Marquez used the motif of birds to portray the nature of the typical relationships that are established throughout the cultural settings of the novel. Along with birds come what is common, Falconry, Falconry is an art, it takes long hours and hard work to succeed at it correctly. It comes with main aspects, such as the hunt and capture of the falcon, then the training of the falcon, which then after training the falcon if the person has done it correctly the falcon will follow the commands that are given. This does establish a relationship between them. Only that the relationship is strictly business about hunting and nothing more. Using the falconry sport, it can relate back to relationships in Chronicle. In Chronicle are used the technique “Hunt and Capture” which
...y subvert this message of dehumanization. Instead, they choose to make their scars work for them in ways other options of communication may fail. Scars prove themselves to be something solid, physical, unchanging to which people may depend on when written and spoken words may fail them. In this way, scars function as a viable alternative form of communication, acting as a medium for storytelling, identification, and shared bond between people. Scars empower those otherwise oppressed. This disproves the assumption that "definitions belong to the definers, not to the defined" in the context that whites make the definitions and rule over blacks. Instead it changed the meaning in that the black people in the book are also definers, breaking away from the rule of the oppressor's language by developing their own interpretations and means of communication.
What is history? History is the analysis and interpretation of the past. History allows us to study both continuity and change over time. It helps to explain how we have changed throughout time. Part of history is using pieces of evidence to interpret and revisit the past. Examples of evidence include written documents, photographs, buildings, paintings, and artifacts. Is history important? When looking at what the definition of history entails, it is clear to see history is in fact, important.