History is the study of past events. In his novel Waterland, Graham Swift entwines the past with the present to create a cyclical rhythm, which flows through the narrative. The narrative explores the notion of temporality and explains that instead of time following a linear pattern, it is, in fact, a circle, which moves in into itself, representing the past, the present, and the future. Chapters often end in the middle of a sentence, then picked up at the beginning of the following chapter, suggesting not only the continuity of the story, but the course of history. This style reinforces the content of Waterland and embodies the theme of history being continuous. Waterland features a history teacher and narrator, Tom Crick, who has been urged to take an early retirement on account of his wife stealing a baby from Safeway, after god told her to (15). To try to understand the present, Tom takes a look into his past and decides to use his experiences as a history lesson, and instead of using the syllabus completely, he begins telling his class—his-story. He does not believe in progression, man takes “one step forward, one step back” throughout history. Through Tom’s personal stories and the juxtaposition of the historical facts, the reader infers that the narrative of Waterland believes that history travels in circles.
Swift uses specific symbols to also represent the cycle by which things occur in nature. At the center of the novel lies a river called the Ouse, which reinforces the circular movement of history. When the narrator describes the flow of the Ouse River he says, “So that while the Ouse flows to the sea, it flows in reality, like all rivers, only back to itself, to its own source; and that impression that a riv...
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...-linear. What happens in the past does not stay in the past. Water comes back when land is reclaimed, eels reproduce via a circular journey, traits of parents are transferred to their children, and decisions affect the future. Throughout the novel, Tom explains how history “goes backwards as it goes forward. It loops. It takes detours,” and it does the same with his style of his narrative (155). The stories communicated by Tom shows how, “[History] repeats itself, how it goes back on itself, no matter how we try to straighten it out. How it twists and turns. How it goes in circles and brings us back to the same place” (162). The narrative embodies the circular progression of time showing that history is never gone, but rather, it manifests itself in the present and somehow repeats.
Works Cited
Swift, Graham. Waterland. New York: Vintage, 1992. Epub.
In the book “The Boys of Winter” by Wayne Coffey, shows the struggle of picking the twenty men to go to Lake Placid to play in the 1980 Olympics and compete for the gold medal. Throughout this book Wayne Coffey talks about three many points. The draft and training, the importance of the semi-final game, and the celebration of the gold medal by the support the team got when they got home.
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reacts to the crosser. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker’s first impression of the swamp
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Throughout a lifetime, one can run through many different personalities that transform constantly due to experience and growing maturity, whether he or she becomes the quiet, brooding type, or tries out being the wild, party maniac. Richard Yates examines acting and role-playing—recurring themes throughout the ages—in his fictional novel Revolutionary Road. Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living miserably in suburbia, experience relationship difficulties as their desire to escape grows. Despite their search for something different, the couple’s lack of communication causes their planned move to Europe to fall through. Frank and April Wheeler play roles not only in their individual searches for identity, but also in their search for a healthy couple identity; however, the more the Wheelers hide behind their desired roles, the more they lose sense of their true selves as individuals and as a pair.
The Flowers By Alice Walker Written in the 1970's The Flowers is set in the deep south of America and is about Myop, a small 10-year old African American girl who explores the grounds in which she lives. Walker explores how Myop reacts in different situations. She writes from a third person perspective of Myop's exploration. In the first two paragraph Walker clearly emphasises Myop's purity and young innocence.
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