Truth in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin

     Truth is an important aspect of Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin. Atwood uses metafiction to bring out what readers believe to be the truth about Iris's character. The novel has many references to writing, and writing about writing, which is what Iris does a lot. The story-within-a-story is used to show the "true account" of Iris's life. It is used to sort of wash Iris clean of any wrongdoing she may have done. Throughout the novel, however, the reader is unsure as to how credible a source Iris is.

     Iris sets down all this information on paper in the hopes that someone will read it and know the truth, but she has no guarantee that will even happen.  "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date" (283). 

     Iris also questions truth by writing explicitly about it. "You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth" (395). This reinforces the credibility of the source. She omits things from the truth, and she says she knows what she has set down is wrong because of that fact. So, how can we as readers trust her word?

     Iris leaves everything until the very end of the book for the reader to discover. It is then that Iris reveals the truth to Laura, inevitably causing her death. Also, by keeping the truth from others, she hurts them. For example, Iris's daughter Aimee. Iris says, "Aimee's death was not my fault" (288). By withholding truth from her own daughter, Iris is responsible for her downfall.

     Iris has an audience in mind as she's writing her version of the story throughout the novel. She writes this for Sabrina, her granddaughter's benefit, thinking she will read this after her death and the truth will be known to her. She also mentions Myra frequently in her narration.

     Inevitably, this is Iris's version of the truth, written by her, for Sabrina. That does not mean it is the absolute truth. The theme truth throughout the novel is not something the reader can rely on. The newspaper clippings can attend to this fact. Progressing through the novel, we see the fabrication of them by none other than Richard and Iris when she makes up the story about how Laura's death was an accident. It can be argued that Iris knew Laura's death was her fault by the end of the novel. So she possibly would want the best version of herself to be known, so she keeps the horrible truth out of her writing. These stories, made up by Iris, make it into newspapers, proving the fact that her story and her version of truth is not reliable.

     

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Print.

Stereotypes of the Orient in American Born Chinese

In the book Orientalism by Edward W. Said, he says in the introduction, "Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions,  vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles." The graphic novel American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang has many stereotypes in it that depict the American ideology of what Chinese people are like. The novel is divided into three parts, and in each part there is some aspect of those stereotypes that can be found.

Jin, a young boy who has moved around a lot to different schools, is one such character who has this stigma of the orient attached to him. In the first part of Jin's story, he was eating dumplings (32), and was made fun of. The stereotype that Chinese eat dogs was applied to him when a kid said, "Stay away from my dog," (33). Because of these stereotypes, Jin was isolated and alone. He could only find friends when he abandoned his Chinese heritage in favor of an American one. Upon meeting Wei-Chen, Jin tells him to "You're in America. Speak English," (37) another instance where he completely denounces his Chinese heritage.

Another instance of an overly dramatized Chinese stereotype can be found in the character of Chinkee. Introduced on page 48, Chinkee exclaims, "Harro Amellica!" His diction is very stereotypical. His physical appearance is also extremely different from the American kids in the school. He has braids in his hair, his head is very large and his eyes are squinted, and his clothes resemble what Americans would associate with the traditional Chinese apparel. His appearance is one that no doubt Americans would find humorous and widely acceptable to their notions of the Orient.

The characters in American Born Chinese reinforce what Americans believe about Chinese people. Through Yang's depiction of Jin on his first days at a new school and through Chinkee's actions and appearance, the Orient stereotype remains much the same to readers as their preconceived notions. Orientalism by Edward Said goes more into depth about the representation of the Orient to Americans, and how there are archetypes created by people in the West, which is evident in American Born Chinese.

Works Cited

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978. Print.

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. First Second, 2006. Print.

Being Indian in America: How characters maintain their sense of identity in Interpreter of Maladies

In the article titled "As American as Mom and Chicken Curry: Home as a Metaphor in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies," Peerboom states that "the home is a place of social definition." (49) In many of the short stories in Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, the characters use their home as a way to keep in touch with their Indian heritage. Some characters were born in India and moved to America, and some were Indian, born in America but knew very little about life in India. Most of these characters maintain their sense of identity through their home life, actions, and storytelling.

In the story Mrs. Sens, the main character is very homesick. She has items in her home, like her blade, which reminds her of being in India. "She had brought the blade from India, where apparently there was at least one in every household." (129)

This knife symbolizes a tradition in India in which she frequently partook, and it gave her a sense of belonging to a group. This tradition was something the women did together when there was a celebration. The blade symbolizes how deeply she needs to hold on to her roots. It is one of the things she can still use while in America and hold on to a shred of who she was.

Mrs. Sens has tapes of her family's voices from the day she left India, and she receives letters from home, although very rarely. She also wears the traditional garb of India; a sari. These things make her happy, and help her hold on to her life in India. On the other hand, Mrs. Sens refuses to drive, something that is completely American. She rejects Americanness in that sense.

The short story, A Real Durwan, has in it another good example of a character that holds onto her heritage through storytelling and the physical object of a set of keys. Boori Ma tells the tenants of the apartment building she cleans of her past lavish lifestyle, frequently adding on the same phrase: "Believe me, don't believe, such comforts you cannot even dream them." (81) By saying this, and reaching for her skeleton keys, Boori Ma is keeping alive her heritage, the home she grew up in, her rich life that she no longer has.

Peerboom's article says, "Those who accept American dominance find acceptance while those who reject it find themselves without a place." (55) This is true for the characters I've looked at in this essay. They seem to be the outcasts that never conformed to American society. They frequently brought up and remembered their heritage in an effort to maintain their identity. They held on to an aspect of India that was important to them, and by doing that, made themselves, in a way, outcasts in America with no place in society.

Works Cited

Peerboom, H. "As American as Mom and Chicken Curry." JASAT, 49-55

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. eBook.

Oppression in Home by Toni Morrison

Oppression is a common theme in Toni Morrison's novel, Home. Whether the oppression be of a certain people based on their race or gender, their situation in life, or their relationships with others, Morrison does a good job of getting that particular point across. In one way or another, all cultures face some sort of oppression, and through this novel readers will see how the African American community has been oppressed by other people and learn of their experiences that came out of that, particularly through Frank and Cee's perspective.

In the beginning of the novel, the reader first sees oppression through the eyes of the main character, Frank Money, as a child. Money might not realize it at the time, but he definitely does later in life as he grows up, how oppressed and separate from the world he is after his experiences in the war. In the first few pages, Frank and his sister, Cee, are watching the unceremonious burial of an African American. Even then at that young age, Frank was protecting his sister. "When she saw that black foot with its creamy pink and mud-streaked sole being whacked into the grave, her whole body began to shake." (15)

Frank tries to protect Cee, and in doing that makes her vulnerable and more dependent on others, even though she is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, as readers will find out later in the novel. Frank's protection oppresses Cee. Certain relationships in the novel between main characters offer a view of how destructive and oppressive they can be. Cee finds herself in a bind when she was working with the doctor and being operated on in an inhumane way, and was saved by her brother. Being a women in that time, and an African woman at that, brought with it all sorts of hardships and forms of oppression entirely different from the things Frank had to deal with, but it was nonetheless a difficulty they shared. Frank had his own problems to deal with pertaining to the war.

Ultimately, what Toni Morrison's novel does is show what African Americans as a whole went through during the time after the Korean War, and in Frank's case, what they went through during it. Home is a historical novel that depicts oppression at its height.  Cee was, in a way, oppressed by her gender and how she started off in the world. That is, she was born into a family with virtually no means to support themselves. That in itself is a form of oppression. Frank, on the other hand, was oppressed by his memories of war.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Home. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012. eBook.

White Privilege Response

I am a white female living in South Mississippi. I come from a middle class family. I'm heterosexual. I don't have any disabilities. I am a Christian, but I don't regularly attend a church. When I tell people this, there is always the chance that they will judge me because I don't conform to the norms of where I come from.

Growing up in a rural town has been easy because I've always been around people the same race as me and people that I have known since childhood. Some unearned privileges of my location are much the same as the ones McIntosh discusses in her essay titled White Privilege. I am almost always associating with people like me. My neighborhood is quiet and safe. I can be sure that I am in safe company when I go to school or go shopping around where I live. Without even realizing it, I have come to expect to have many of these privileges and the privileges that McIntosh mentions in her essay. Before this class, it had never occurred to me that people of my race had so many unearned privileges.

The privileges I have can be very oppressive because they limit my views on things. I haven't experienced many different cultures because I never really had the chance to get out and travel until recently. I never pushed myself to explore different things until now.

I agree with McIntosh when she says, "I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege." This is something we pretend not to have because if we uncover it, how will we react to it? Like McIntosh says, "Having described it what will I do to lessen or end it?" Being ignorant of unfair advantages gives us the impression that we earned what we have, but did we? How did we get to where we are today?

Reading this essay has brought a lot of things to light. I have never given a lot of thought to just how many privileges white people have. It is true that we see these privileges as invisible, and we are completely oblivious to the advantages we have and take for granted everyday. This essay definitely makes me view things differently.