I thought that one of the major encompassing themes in Dream Jungle<\/u> was the issue of perception in history. Most history is based on perception, and therefore it’s very difficult to have cold, hard truth when discussing it. Hagedorn’s story is based on real people and real occurrences, which makes her story a historical account, except through a different perception. She said that the idea of the novel came from seeing Zamora’s (his real-life alter ego, I forget his name) picture and obituary in the newspaper one day. The character of Paz portrays Hagedorn’s real-life experience with Zamora, and so she plunges into the novel, re-creating a fictionalized account of actual events and people, thus re-writing history. (Hagedorn and Zamora’s families really did know one another, she really did sit through an awkward interview on his terrace, etc) By using the different character’s voices to narrate the novel, she is pushing the concept of “perception” that much further. Each character has a different, unique perception to what is occurring and the world around them. Lina’s perception of Zamora, Fritz’s perception of his father and Zamora, Moody’s perception of the Philippines, etc. The narration is schizophrenic, but it’s also very intentional and goes along with Hagedorn’s attempt at re-creating the mixed, jumbled feeling of collecting historical accounts in order to form one succinct interpretation – and never coming to a solid truth. This is paired with Pierce’s “perception” of Vietnam, creating a movie to depict the event, but also re-writing history. He in fact re-writes his version of history over 90+ times. And really, isn’t all history re-written about a thousand different times. The movie is virtually the same mode of historical portrayal as the book, because it’s based on a real event, real people, but there still isn’t any truth. I think I’m confusing myself now. I was just thinking about how future generations, my generation even, will watch movies like Apocalypse Now and our perception of Vietnam will come from those images. The first thing I think of when WWI or WWII comes up is Tom Hanks storming Normandy, it’s my version of truth, it’s my perception of history. Hagedorn re-writing the history of Zamora, the Taobo, the making of Apocalypse Now, although fictionalized, is still her perception of a reality, and she uses the voices of the various characters to emphasize the varying degrees of interpretation an event can have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought that one of the major encompassing themes in Dream Jungle was the issue of perception in history. Most history is based on perception, and therefore it’s very difficult to have cold, hard truth when discussing it. Hagedorn’s story is based on real people and real occurrences, which makes her story a historical account, … Continue reading Perceptions of History<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}