History as Fiction Sarah

I never thought Dana to be capable of murder. She was young, educated, and an aspiring writer working dead end jobs without a murderous bone in her body. Yet throughout the novel we saw the deterioration of Dana as she was put through trial after trial at the plantation. In her first trip to the plantation, Dana mentally comforts herself by telling herself that one day she will return back to her modern life. However, with each trip to plantation she starts to experience the full physical effect of planation life (i.e., whippings, the fields, selling of slaves) and she becomes unable to mentally detach herself. Instead, Dana starts to feel as if she belongs at the plantation more than she does in her own modern life.                As Dana suffers from the whippings and daily inhumane treatment, she starts to lose herself and she results to drastic measures such as slitting her wrists just to go back to her mode...

            Close your eyes and imagine an alternative world where we learn history though novels like Slaughterhouse-Five written from the perspective of people who experienced the events instead of our traditional textbooks. Imagine a world that doesn’t consider a 5 on AP World History to be mastery of history, because it really isn’t, it’s just endless memorization of facts and events. Imagine learning about not only each country’s rhetoric during war, but also the life lasting effects of war on the civilians and soldiers whose worldviews are never the same again. If we learned history though its aftereffects, I believe we would learn so much more and our world could be a different place. There is something just so raw, unfiltered, and moving about people talking about their experiences. I’ve never been moved to tears reading the statistics about migrant camps but listening to just one of their stories had a profound impa...

            During this whole epic journey of searching for the Text I never once guessed that in the end Jes Grew would be able to continue after the book had been destroyed. Looking back the whole idea of finding this definitive Text, is an extremely Atonist idea. Atonist religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam revolve around holy texts and Islam prides itself on never changing the holy text over thousands of years. It would be completely against the spirit of Jes Grew for it to stand motionless for millennia. The ending of this novel is a reminder that while there are certain constants perceived by the Atonists in this world, a movement never dies it just evolves. Over the past six decades the Civil Rights movement evolved into the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements. Evolution of a movement is evidence how culture changes and how a movement adapts and continues in different societies. Today, racial in...