Invisible Bigger

The narrator of The Invisible Man is clearly "invisible", seeing as he states so himself at the very start of the book by saying, "I am an invisible man". And he clearly doesn't mean it in the sense he is unable to be seen because he clarifies by saying, "No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms". So the question is why is he invisible? As he puts it, "they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me." What this means is that when people look at him they see a generalization of someone who is African-American, instead of an actual individual person. So what he means by being invisible is actually just hiding behind the fact that people see him as a generalization and therefore don't identify him in their minds as a person. This is shown when the narrator is taking to Norton and Norton refers to the narrator as a cog, showing him he thinks of him as no different from the rest of the students.
Bigger is invisible in the same way. With the exception of Max and Jan, most white people in the book fail to see him as his own person. For example. Dalton sees Bigger as just another African-American he's helped just like how Norton views the narrator. Another example is how during the search for Bigger the mob rounds up lots of other people like him even though they have a picture of him. This is similar to when the narrator beats the man up and the man claims he was mugged just because it fit convention. Another thing to consider about Bigger is that he is written to be invisible. An important part of Native Son was how Bigger was defined by environment more than he was by his actions. So in a way Bigger is meant to be invisible to the reader so that we can look past his character and more at the environment which Wright is trying to criticize.

Powerful Paranoia

Something core to most conspiracy theories is questioning he normality of an event. That being, is something that happened just a coincidence that isn't very unlikely, or does it have some aspect of abnormality to it and as such is of more importance. DeLillo plays around with this idea in several situations. The first time DeLillo brings something like this up is during a Nicholas Branch scene where he is looking at the deaths among those associated with Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. DeLillo starts out the scene by writing, "Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness." What this does is try to shut down the idea that there was anything strange about the death rates. I find that interesting because Libra is a conspiracy novel, so it shutting down something like that seems counter-intuitive. Still, DeLillo goes on supporting the fact that they weren't anything special by talking about the methods of killing and how they were completely unconnected. My question is, why would DeLillo, after showing how these killing are normal, go on to give details about each one, in a say similar to someone trying to make something of them would? And I think the reason he does so is to show how easily the human mind makes patterns and jumps into paranoia about certain things. Even after he explained that there wasn't anything statistically off, when I read the part where he describes several of the deaths, I can't help by be suspicious. My mind automatically makes the connections and says that there is something going on even though I know there isn't really.
DeLillo also brings up some coincidences during a scene with Lee and Ferries. During that scene he portrays the coincidences as exactly that, just coincidences, and shows how David Ferrie uses them to manipulate Lee. By doing this he is once again saying that these coincidences people point to aren't really all that odd, but at the same time is pointing out the coincidences as if to say, "still it seems like there us something strange about that doesn't it?" This once again shows how we really can't help connecting certain things.

George de Mohrenschildt

Of all of the characters in the book, the strange and interesting ones seem to be the people that DeLillo isn't making up. So I thought I would do a little research on George de Mohrenschildt who seemed to be the most interesting of all of the real characters. As DeLillo describes him he is an international man of intrigue like Lawrence Parmenter but is real. As DeLillo writes George de Mohrenschildt was
A charming and worldly man able to converse fluently in Russian, English, French, Spanish, probably Togo as well, or whatever they spoke in Togoland.  Larry liked the man. He’d known him for some years and was aware that George had been debriefed by the Agency after several trips abroad. But even though their business interests had overlapped once or twice, he wasn’t sure quite what George’s racket was.
This leaves this air of mystery around him because we don't actually find out what he really does for a living. DelLillo also writes,
But his marriages didn’t explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.
While I was reading this I wondered how much was true, so I did some research. I found that there were in fact rumors that he had ties to foreign intelligence and that he admitted he had ties to French intelligence. I also found that he was born in Mozyr, Russia and was part of the Dallas Russian community that had shunned Lee because of his background. I also found that there were, in fact, allegations of Nazi activity on his part. Crazily enough he also did get kicked out of Mexico. According to him it was might have been because General Maxino Camacho of the Mexican Army, was jealous of his relationship with Lilia Larin, a Mexican citizen he met and fell in love with.
I found various other things that match with DeLillo's short summary of what he has done and I must say I was expecting at least some of it to be made up.

Playing a Character?

In Kindred, Dana has talked about how she and Kevin are just playing characters and aren't actually a part of what is going on many times. In class, we also talked about how she is pretending to be someone she isn't and that she understands that. An example of this is when Dana says, "we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles.We never forgot that we were acting" (Butler 98).  This shows that while they are playing characters they are still separate from their characters. This becomes apparent in this scene that followed when Dana talks to Kevin about what is wrong with the game the children are playing and even says that she breaks character herself. But at the same time, the understanding that she is playing a character enough to separate her from her character. This is true both mentally and physically. Take, for example, the scene where Tom Weylin sees Dana leaving Kevin's room in the morning. Even though Dana knows that there is nothing shameful about what happened in her time, Weylin is able to make her feel ashamed because of the character she is playing. But on the other hand, Dana is still susceptible to physical threats and pain because even though she is acting, the consequences are all too real. This becomes apparent at the start when the patroller tries to rape her and continues through the book. These difference to Dana just being an actor made me think of a book I read several years ago. It was about a detective who went undercover as a girl who had been murdered (because she looked very similar) to try to find out who murdered the girl. During the book, the detective knew she was playing a role but was still in danger. I think that that is a better analogy to Dana's situation. She isn't an actor as much as she is an undercover detective.

Unclimactic War

There is no question that the goal of the Slaughterhouse-Five is for it to act as an anti-war novel. The narrator himself promises that it will be when he is talking to Mary in chapter one. He makes his promise by saying, "I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne" (Vonnegut 19). What he is saying is that the story isn't going to be about the "glory" of war but instead about the inherent truth. But that raises the question is it possible to write an anti-war book? That question has to be asked because of so many movies and novels that show war as a glorious thing.
But despite that, Vonnegut definitely succeeds in making Slaughterhouse-Five an anti-war novel. To do so he uses several techniques that make the novel incredibly anti-climactic and makes the reader feel uninvolved. He does this by making Billy Pilgrim the epitome of a horrible soldier. He writes it so that Billy is seen as a joke, often because he acts like one. He picks out the most ridiculous jacket, he puts on silver boots from a play and even gets asked if he is trying to make a joke. When combined with the way Billy acts disconnected from everything around him, for example, smiling at the weirdest times, the war-like scenes in the war don't seem exciting. An example of this is the scene where the two scout gets shot. While there is action going on, the tone of the book and the straightforward way it was narrated was able to make the scene not interesting in terms of action.
Another strategy he uses is irony. The book is absolutely full of irony and most of it is built around the same idea: those that are ready for the war and want to live, tend to die, while Billy who is not prepared whatsoever and makes no discernable attempts to stay alive continues to live. Once again a perfect example is the scene when the two scout gets shot. The two scouts who know what they are doing get shot and die but Billy somehow makes it out alive. What this does is show that war isn't a chance to prove yourself at all. You can prepare all you want but when it comes done to it the nature of war is so brutal that it doesn't matter.
Another thing Vonnegut does is using soldiers that don't match the stereotype used in typical war movies and books. Instead he follows up on his promise to Mary and portrays the soldiers as children and other people who don't want to be there. By making the soldiers in the war children like Roland Weary and Werner Gluck, or farmers like the soldiers that found Billy and Roland, or teachers like Edgar Derby, Vonnegut creates absolutely no character that would be played by Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. This shows that wars weren't actually entirely fought by people who were seeking honor and glory and instead shows the hard truth.

The Sun Also Rises Through Reed Glasses

In class, we talked about what we thought the world would look like today if we thought about it in the context of the atonists and Jes Grew. We talked about how the Black Lives Matter movement could be seen as the black empowerment part of Jes Grew. We also talked about how academia had become much more atonist. Overall, I thought that the discussion was very interesting. But something during the not so brief recap of the entire known history of Jes Grew caught my attention. Reed writes,  "When he heard of this, old Set ordered the murder of the Bulls and being a particularly mean cuss, ordered that they be tortured 1st. (This led to the sport that the American writer Ernest Hemingway took such delight in)" (Reed 167). This, of course, reminded me of The Sun Also Rises and made me wonder what it would look like if I thought about it in the context of Mumbo Jumbo. As I was skimming through the book to help refresh my memory I noticed how atonist the book seemed so it made sense that Reed referenced it. For example, there is the romanticization of the Basques. But thinking about history in the context of Mumbo Jumbo, The Sun Also Rises could have been an Atonist novel similar to how Harding could have been an Atonist puppet even though his slogan, "a return to normalcy", wasn't in reference to Jes Grew.
Since the overall plot of The Sun Also Rises is clearly Atonist, I decided to try to look at some of the main characters and judge where I think they would land on a scale from Hinckle Von Vamptom to Papa Labas. I started with Jake and decided he would land towards Hinckle Von Vampton simply because he is quite racist and homophobic and is one of the biggest fans of the bullfighting . For example, he makes fun of an African- American's speech and is called an aficionado. As for Bill he is around the same as Jake but is a little more outwardly so. Then there is Brett. Unlike the other two, she isn't racist or homophobic. She even defends some people from Jakes at times and seems involved in the culture in France. However, she doesn't really respect the culture in Spain. As such she is more towards the upper-middle of the scale. As for Cohn, I don't really know where he would fit because his role in the novel was mostly related to Brett.

Plausible History

It is undeniable that the history portrayed by Doctorow in Ragtime has its elements of fiction. But Doctorow writes the book so that some of what he made up has an element of plausibility. This is especially true towards the start of the book where he would add small details to show that the events he was talking about happened but nobody else knew about them. This creates this bubble in history where something could have happened, but as far as we know didn't. But the bubble only remains if you don't look farther into what Doctorow is writing about. If you do, there are small details that can disprove it. An example of this is the strange scene in the prison between Harry Houdini and Harry Thaw. At the end of the scene, Doctorow writes, "Houdini was to tell no one of this strange confrontation". Of course, if you look into it Thaw was in a different prison than the one Houdini escaped from. However, if you didn't look it up you have to consider the fact that it might have happened.

Throughout the beginning of the book, Doctorow continues to hide his fake events in bubbles in the past. Another example is the meeting between Ford and Morgan and the secret society no one else knew about. However, as the book progresses, Doctorow does less and less to make it seem like the events are true. This starts around the time of Coalhouse's retaliation for the vandalism of his car. In fact,  after the bombing and attack on the second firehouse, Doctorow does the exact opposite of what he was doing before. Instead of having very few individuals know what happened, all of America knows. He writes, "The story of Coalhouse's second attack made the front page of every newspaper in the country". Of course, this raises the question of why Doctorow would specifically write it so that it shows that everyone would have known about it. I think that it is so he can show just how easily events that are thought to be incredibly famous at the time can so easily be forgotten over time. And at the same time how easy it is to write a fictional story that can just seem like forgotten history.