The Beauty of the Millihelen

The second time Dana goes to Maryland, she witnesses the brutal whipping of Alice's father lying on the ground nearby. She watches "the man's body [convulse]" (36) as he gets whipped, slowly having his resolve chipped away. It gets to the point where Dana is physically pained just from witnessing it. As she says, "My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn't they stop!" (36). Before the scene is finished, Dana is holding back vomit. In this moment, we witness the blurring of the line between historian and participant in history. And while this scene by far isn't the most obvious example of participating in history (since the entire rest of the book is also about that), it is an important scene due to the switch between witnessing and being in the slave era. In this scene, Dana experiences feelings that she didn't expect from just watching the beating take place. Despite having "seen people bea...

For this post, I figured it might be fun to talk about Slaughterhouse-Five  in relation to other Kurt Vonnegut novels. It turns out that a good number of characters in Slaughterhouse-Five  are reused in other Vonnegut books either as minor characters or full-blown protagonists. Having read some of these books, I'd like to compare some characters and how they're depicted in their respective novels compared to Slaughterhouse-Five  in an attempt to explore the world of Vonnegut. To be entirely clear, I'm not trying to make an overarching argument or anything here. I just thought it might be fun to talk about the Vonnegut expanded universe. Kilgore Trout  is far and away the most prolific character. Apparently based on Vonnegut's earlier friend Theodore Sturgeon (you can tell based on the last names), Kilgore Trout appears in a majority of Vonnegut's novels in some way, shape, or form. He's a catalyst for many characters, such as we see in Slaughterhouse-Five ...

We've had multiple discussions in class at this point about what exactly constitutes the difference between "history" and "fiction," and I'm pretty sure the answer that we've all come to is that it's complicated. Like, unfortunately complicated. All of the novels we're reading for this class claim to be historic, and to a certain degree, they are. Ragtime  and Mumbo Jumbo  both incorporate very real historical events and figures. But of course they're not actual history they aren't that  historical in their accounts. This is what makes Mumbo Jumbo  such a pain in the ass to deal with, and I'm positive that Ishmael Reed is laughing at us for having these discussions. Mumbo Jumbo  provides us with an absolutely bizarre meta-narrative that seems so ridiculous, it's morbidly close to reality. For the past 3,000 years, a secret society has been working to uproot humanity from its traditional, non-Atonist roots and move away from natu...

I don't know about anyone else reading this blog post, but for me, there's always been a certain appeal to secret societies. Something about them and the unknown power that they have really has a sense of mysticism or wonder. There's a lot of fun to be had with questioning whether or not the world as we know it is secretly being controlled by some underground organization like the Illuminati or the Deep State. While it almost certainly isn't, there's still something captivating about these secret societies tapping into some ethereal power via rituals and magic to control the balances of the world we live in. That being said, they're also an easy tool for people to leapfrog into whatever absolutely whacky conspiracy theory they want. If we suspend common judgment for just a while and believe that secret societies do actually have some power in controlling our world, they can be used to re-explain the history of practically anything. The U.S. invasion of the Phi...

I mean, don't actually but you know. What I specifically have a problem with regarding postmodernism is the way people have apparently gone about trying to define and categorize it as another one of history's literary movements with specific traits that all postmodern works have in common. It's fair to want to do that, considering postmodernism is a legitimate movement and difficult to understand if you don't know what you're looking for. But I don't think you have to think very hard to recognize just the general ridiculousness of postmodernism and its basic concepts. Postmodernism is supposed to be fun. It literally surrounds everything in the world we live in. Almost every single time that I'm using my phone or laptop, I'm constantly exposed to slang, memes, and a culture of complete irony and general postmodernism. I'm not gonna spend this post trying to explain postmodernism is from my point of view, but I think you can get a sense of what I ...