History as Fiction Sarah

            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...

“That’s it?!” I remarked to my dad as we walked around the Lebanese National Museum. After our road trips to the various ruins such as the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, I expected a behemoth of a museum storing various Anatolian and Phoenician artifacts, but was instead faced with a space a quarter of the size of the Art Institute in Chicago. I walked out sorely disappointed while my father told me about the destruction and looting the museum suffered during the Civil War (1975-1990) in addition to Lebanon’s history as a French colony. Later that year my elementary school class took a trip up to the Oriental Institute of UChicago and to my disbelief I encountered a couple of collections that rivaled that of the Lebanese National Museum. These memories have lain dormant in the back of my mind until we read Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo in class this year. In Mumbo Jumbo, America is described as “Europe’s last hope, the protector of the archives of mankind’s achievements.” In addition w...

In class Pomona brought up how the presentation of class struggle in Ragtime is Michael Mooresque, starting from building sympathy towards the working class by laying out the facts of their plights and then switching to a scene of overindulgent wealth. Clearly, Doctorow does not kindly look upon the rich that dominated the early 1900s as he points out how greed creates and feeds the wealthy’s mentality that they are superior to other people through the line, “the laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one man, but the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country.” Then Doctorow elicits disgust, as he nonchalantly describes the workers’ deaths and maiming that allow the wealthy to fund balls that make a farce of charity. When reading this passage, I felt disillusionment with the regulatory system that upheld the rich at the expense of the poor and I realized that the themes of...