History as Fiction -- Elizabeth

In my group’s panel presentation our article brought up the question of what Vonnegut actually meant with his humor. Our article claimed that the novel at face value presented two “antithetical” options: either Vonnegut’s humor was meant to inspire “political quietism” or it was meant to instill, with its lack of moral distinctions and constant irreverence towards literally everything, a need for both realism and actual meaningful societal change, in the reader. Our article also brought up evidence that Vonnegut himself seemed to fall, at least in his writing, more into the “fatalistic resignation” camp. In class discussion, there was no real straight answer, which makes sense. The novel offers plenty of material to justify either idea. For a novel that’s anti-war, there doesn’t seem to be many efforts made to make the reader angry about war’s injustices or violence: instead, all moral weight is essentially erased. The narration of the novel treats the death of both champagne and 130,...

One of the central conflicts of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo is the narrative of how Jes Grew is struggling to “find its text.” Although it originally is ambiguous what, exactly, that means, it becomes clear that on some level there is a literal “text” that describes the history of Jes Grew and the world. However, like Jes Grew itself, this text has been suppressed by the Atonists and their wallflower order. The vivid story that Papa LaBas describes about Osiris, Set, and the rest of Jes Grew history is replaced by the more sterile, monotonous narrative that the Atonist view believes in In the larger context throughout the novel, there is a theme of events in the novel being obviously fictional, but nevertheless very parallel to real-life themes and ideas. For example it’s not exactly correct to say that Jes Grew “is” jazz music, or a specific type of dance, or something like that -- but it does suggest elements of all of those ideas. In a similar way, I think that the idea of Jes Gre...