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Libra and The Truman Show: Challenge the Narrative?

DISCLAIMER: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. PLEASE DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE TRUMAN SHOW Friday night, as I was browsing Netflix on my couch with my cats trying to think of ways not to do my homework, I stumbled across the movie The Truman Show. I had seen it before but decided to watch it again. Upon my second watch, I noticed some strange similarities between it and the plot of Libra , as well as some differences... For those who have forgotten, the The Truman Show is about a man named Truman whose entire life is televised without his knowledge, and everyone around him is an actor on the show. The show takes place inside a large dome in a town called Seahaven. The movie begins with a portrait of Truman's everyday life, getting up in the morning and heading to work, and we see the viewers of the show watch and react to his quirks. In some odd sense, The Truman Show and Libra attack similar themes. The Truman Show mainly deals with Truman's struggle to understa...
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I Am One With The Force (of History)

While reading Libra, I've noticed that Oswald not only is fascinated by communism and revolution, but also seems to fixate on this notion of history as a force, and "merging with history". On page 101, DeLillo writes "...the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin...We live forever in history..." This idea pops up a lot when Oswald is going through hardships - he seems to think about the "history in the room" when he's with his mother, or locked up in jail with Dupard and the abusive guards. Although I'm still struggling with what the purpose of this idea is, it reminded me of a few things which might provoke some new thoughts in someone else (help me!). In US History this ...
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If I Was You, I'd be You, Too

We've been talking a lot in class about the question of self - where does performance become the self?  Kindred seems to assert that there is a very fine line, if there is a line, between the self and the performance. We see this assertion when Dana feels shame coming out of Kevin's room in the morning at the Weylin house, when Weylin winks at her - her "act" has meshed with the reality of the world she's living in, and she's internalized feelings which she never thought she could have. We see this also in the (slightly?) sympathetic portrayal of Weylin and Rufus, which complicates our perceptions of slaveowners by forcing us to view them as real people. In some sense, not only does the novel raise the question of "what would it be like to live in another time period, and what happens to our sense of self" but also "what would it be like to be someone else?" In a way, the first question turns into the second one when Dana sympathizes with...
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Billy's PTSD vs. Veterans' PTSD

We've been talking a lot in class about how Billy's experiences may be manifestations of PTSD - that is, if his jumping around in time and experiences on Tralfamadore are to be taken metaphorically and not literally. (For the purposes of this post, I am going to take them metaphorically, though there is some ambiguity in the way Vonnegut writes the story.) To try to better understand this metaphor, I looked up some basic information on PTSD and found that although Billy exhibits many of the symptoms, he also seems to exhibit unexpected behavior for someone with PTSD. The article I found cites the main symptoms of PTSD as being: "1.  Re-experiencing the trauma through intrusive distressing recollections of the event, flashbacks, and nightmares, 2.  Emotional numbness and avoidance of places, people, and activities that are reminders of the trauma, and 3.  Increased arousal such as   difficulty sleeping  and concentrating, feeling jumpy, and being easily irri...
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Mr. Leff is Thor Wintergreen

I want to assert right now, I don't think that Mr. Leff is Thor Wintergreen. I'm sorry for deceiving and using you. We've been talking a lot in class recently about modern manifestations of Jes Grew and Atonism and the specifics of those ideologies. My thoughts about Jes Grew and Atonism in the "real world" have mainly revolved around phenomena which could be considered both - Pro-Jes-Grew texts written in Atonist ways, or as we talked about in class today, Bruno Mars' Super Bowl performance in which he calls upon elements of hip-hop culture but his performance is "watered down" for an Atonist audience. As if I didn't already have enough brain food, we started talking about jazz culture in the 1920s in US History class this week, an inherently Jes Grew topic in a somewhat Atonist setting. I started thinking, how do we evaluate phenomena with both Jes Grew and Atonist elements? What do we label them? Is US History class a form of Jes Grew? For...
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Postmodernist Historical Google doc

The other night, we were asked in class to think about what a postmodernist history would look like, and even though we talked about it, I am still struggling with it. When I pondered the question initially, my first instinct was that a postmodernist history would be full of narrative and fiction. I thought about Ragtime and how Doctorow creates "pockets" in his narrative, pushing the perceived boundary between history and fiction to achieve some kind of higher truth. For example, we talked about how Morgan and Ford have a secret society in Ragtime  or how Morgan thinks he is a reincarnated pharaoh. Doctorow never explicitly writes anything in his novel that violates our perception of history, or could not feasibly have happened - he makes Morgan and Ford's society a secret that they never share with anyone. He creates a pocket instead of writing, for example, that Morgan and Ford both turned themselves into bees and lived the rest of their lives as bees, because there i...
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Doctorow's distinctive lack of quotation marks when a character speaks has been on my mind ever since we started reading Ragtime. Without fail, Doctorow's characters never speak in quotations, their dialogue is simply printed on the page alongside the narration. The effect of omitting quotations varies throughout the book depending on the context, but I often find it jarring when Doctorow's writing switches from narration to quotation, or vice versa, with little warning. For example, on page 210, the narration switches from Father, to Mother's Younger Brother, to Father again, making it somewhat confusing if you read it fast. To honor Doctorow, I'll quote it here but won't use quotation marks: Younger Brother was sitting with his elbow on the arm of his chair and his head propped in his hand. His index finger was extended and pointed at his temple. He watched his brother-in-law. Are you going out to find him and shoot him? he said. I'm going to protect my ...
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