Jeana's Blog

 One of the more dramatic and perhaps even shocking moments of Kindred was the scene where Dana is called back to the past only to find out that Alice had committed suicide. She later learns that Rufus lied to Alice about selling her children, causing Alice to spiral into depression and commit suicide rather than go on living in a world where her only light had been extinguished by the man who forced her. In a way, Dana’s actions caused or helped to cause the events that led up to Alice’s suicide. Rufus is afraid of being abandoned, which drives him to use extreme tactics to try and get Alice to stay. On page 255, Rufus claims in a conversation with Dana that he is afraid she will leave him and never come back. He states, “But in my nightmares, you leave without helping me. You walk away and leave me in trouble, hurting, maybe dying…they started way back at the fire -- as soon as I realized you could help me or not, just as you chose…when Alice had been here a while, they went away...

     Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo describes Jes’ Grew as a virus that causes people to sing and dance, causing a flourishing of black culture in the 1900s that took form in uncontrollable singing, dancing, and jazz. In general, Jes’ Grew seems to describe the genesis of new culture and its sometimes virus-like spread through society, characterized by the backlash against it (in Mumbo Jumbo, it was the Atonists against jazz). This backlash usually seems to arise from the older generation, who protest that Jes’ Grew’s manifestations are frivolous and not “real culture.”  Jes’ Grew maintains its relevance today, perhaps even more so because of how easily different cultures can intermingle and spread through technology and the Internet. In fact, it seems that technology has exacerbated the spread of Jes’ Grew throughout the youth of today’s society. The internet is the prime place for culture to be established, created, and publicize itself to not just a single country or ...

 J. P. Morgan, or John Pierpont Morgan, a wealthy businessman obsessed with Egyptology, met his untimely demise in Egypt after his health rapidly deteriorated upon his inability to find the otherworldly experience he had sought for years. At least, that’s what happened at the end of Ragtime by Doctorow. The real J.P. Morgan died of a stroke while traveling abroad in Rome, Italy, though he was in Egypt for some time before that. He was also an avid member of the Episcopal Church, which feels like quite a stretch from Egyptology. However, I think the reason Doctorow chose to portray J. P. Morgan in such a way was not because of its apparent truth, but because of Morgan’s significance as a figure in history. His influence was quite extraordinary; one article I saw when I looked up his name titled him as “the man who bought the world”. Learning about him does make one wonder what it must be like to be a man as powerful as Morgan, someone who has the world at his fingertips -- and I thi...

One of the big things that stood out to me as I read Ragtime was the description of the worker’s strike and its consequences for Tateh and his little girl. The way his experiences were narrated somehow highlighted and made personal this experience of marching and striking to the workers in a way I didn’t feel when I learned about this event in history. The story from the two’s perspective really gave me the immigrant point of view through Tateh, who does whatever he needs to survive. I felt a sense of realism in the narrative despite Tateh being a fictional character. Doctorow somehow managed to capture the “feel” of the time period a lot better than just a statement of facts or a historically accurate fictional work. In some ways, I was able to learn more through this telling of the times compared to other more conventional methods of teaching. The interesting interactions between historical characters who never would have met otherwise (each one being unrealistic, yet realistic in it...