Grace's History as Fiction Blog

* the title of this blog post is on page 85 of DeLillo's work As I was reading the “In Atsugi” chapter, I was expecting more focus on the military action at the base in Japan, but was surprised to find that most of the reading was about Lee’s experience in the city. In particular, the first half of the chapter describes in detail his experience in Tokyo with Matsuki and Konno. The effects that these characters have on Lee start to reveal a lot about him, not only to us as readers, but also to himself, as he is starting to understand his own worldviews. First, his budding relationship with Matsuki shows his ability and willingness to let himself go for pleasure, regardless of any work that needs to be done. He briefly mentions seeing “Japanese girls walking hand in hand with U.S. servicemen” in the beginning of the chapter, and sooner than later he becomes one of these war-men that he described. They’d have intercourse in a traditional yet seemingly “imitat...

    For this blog post, I would like to focus on one section in chapter 7 of The Fall that really stood out to me. On page 99, Dana and Kevin saw a group of slave children around a tree stump. Upon closer analysis, they realize that the kids were playing pretend-slave auction. Dana leaves in disgust after hearing how the children argued over the price of their friends, just as they had seen white slave owners objectify and bargain over their own mothers and fathers.     In their following discussion, Kevin seems much more detached from what they had just observed while Dana is distraught and insisting that the game was much more than a mere game of pretend. Although Kevin’s point about them not being able to change part of history is sort of valid, the fact that he admits to never being shown the whippings or the terror in punishments for slaves on the plantation reveals how sheltered white people were in the Antebellum south. If you were any part of a white family ...