I am still uncertain as to how I feel about the book. There were parts of it I found really touching and a bit moving, but almost every feeling I got from these "touching parts" was eradicated by the reminder of how illogical it all was. Perhaps this is a fault on my part.
I was a bit disappointed by the absurdity of the ending. Yes, it was clever to end with the symbol of Dana "leaving part of herself behind," but the means by which Butler achieves this seem to me a tad comical. Again, everytime I started to feel something, I was numbed by the book's complete lack of logic. It's not even that irrationality bothers me, it's just that it seems to not fit well in this book. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most irrational, illogical books I have ever read, but its absence of logic is fitting because it is the foundation from which the book is built. There is quite the gap between dancing lobsters and nineteenth century slavery.
What I liked most about the book was the pure realism involved with Rufus. I think he is the most realistically developed character in the novel. He is a such a complex, confusing, and at times, unreadable character. He is a product of his father, yet still retains traits of his own. I wanted so badly for him to become good, but if my wishful thinking would've come true, he would not have been a very real character. He is walking proof of how strongly we are influenced by our environment and how truly unstable we are when we try to be ourselves while someone else is shaping us.
I am starting to think that traveling back in time is just a creative manifestation of the way we distort history by looking back on it from dishonest eyes. Dana goes back in time and things obviously do not happen as they did the first time it was the nineteenth century. Could this be symbolic of the way history changes each time we look back into it? We are biased in the sense that we will never be able to see first hand what took place in the past. We are constantly discovering new things and getting new perspectives about the past; our history books are always changing.
1 comment:
Micah, I really appreciate your honest reactions to the book: both the aspects that you like and the aspects you find less satisfying (or maybe even drive you crazy?). I think it's really insightful to consider the distortion of history, particularly how that relates to Dana. What did Dana know about slavery before her trip? About her family? What about Kevin?
I think you're also right to focus on how the book is irrational. But I think we could make an argument that in many ways slavery is irrational or perhaps inexplicable. The slave system, like the characters in the novel, was ridden with contradictions (e.g., slaves are people but they're not people), and yet it was so easy for people to adapt to.
I'm not at all trying to suggest that you're "wrong" to respond to the book in this way, since I don't think there's a wrong way to respond to a book. I do think that you've focused on really important qualities of the book, even (and perhaps especially) those that have frustrated you.
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