Chattahoochee River
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Intentional or not?
One aspect of literature that fascinates me is tone. As I was reading the chapter I continually searched for cues and inside into the emotion of the author. The events of the chapter were horrifying and I imagined the terror that I would experience if I were there, but I did not perceive that sense of terror from the author. I wonder if this is intention, or if it's the natural tone this author would have if he narrated this story out loud. I would understand if it was intentional. In the first paragraph of the preface the author claims he wrote this book to go insane. In my mind I connect insanity to sociopaths who show no emotion at all, or know how to imitate emotion, but don't feel it for themselves. I truly believe that as the writer wrote this, and recalled the events of this horrific part of our history, he went insane.
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I agree that the way he narrates most of the story is not to provide some sort of shock value...though at times, he will insert a reflective comment in parenthesis that seems to be more of his "adult" voice wondering why there wasn't more urgency for example. I don't think he wrote the book to go insane (the preface indicates that others speculated why he wrote it and posed that as a possibility). He says he doesn't fully know why he wrote it, but he does say how he essentially forced himself to testify -- to bear witness -- so that history would not repeat itself, so that another child would not have to live through what he did (but that so many others did not).
ReplyDeleteWriting is one way people work through tradgey to help them helpfully process things. I disagree that he "went insane writing it" though I am sure allowing such memories to resurface into ones conciousness would make one feel insane. The only way that members of the Holocaust survived was by detatching temporarily as he said the Nazis made them less than human. His tone to me is shows his outlook. They had to remove themselves from the situation and keep a force sense of calm. This farther shows the psychological horror of what the Nazis did by taking away their victims humanness.
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