This is coming from having read up through 261.<\/p>\n
Still thinking about the use of genres as I read the novel, and as I write this, and was trying to come up with additional ways to look at the\u00a0 constant references.\u00a0 One of the most compelling reasons I came up with for them has to do with a desire for moral justice or simplification.\u00a0 The torture, terror, death, and oppression of Trujillo’s reign was something almost unfathomably evil.\u00a0 (I hesitate to use terms like “evil” because they situate the world and people on a black and white moral spectrum of “right and wrong” which I don’t really believe in, but with Trujillo, I will make an exception.)\u00a0 As was suggested in class, genre villains and heroes can be used to express the immensity of this evil.\u00a0 But I want to go one beyond that and say that these genre figures are situated in universes in which moral justice is assured, or at least the immorality of the villains is certain and the morality of the heroes is also certain.\u00a0 The moral or innocent underdog will eventually succeed, against overwhelming odds, to crush and dispel the influence of the evil tyrant.\u00a0 Obviously, this represents an ideal, fantasized situation for both Oscar and for the Dominicans under Trujillo, a moral universe which the real world is brutally at odds with.<\/p>\n
So, why, specifically, is there the desire to put the narrative and the history of the DR in that moral universe? Going back to the idea of trauma, is it an attempt to achieve psychological control over a traumatic and baffling situation?\u00a0 Is looking at life through these genre universes a way for Oscar and Yunior to achieve catharsis which they couldn’t find in their day to day lives?\u00a0 I think it’s easy to look at the use of genre references in the novel as something merely stylistic, but it’s increasingly obvious to me that they have fundamental importance to the narrative.\u00a0 They aren’t something that should be glossed over, and, on closer examination, they provide a number of significant and deeply layered interpretative opportunities for the reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is coming from having read up through 261. Still thinking about the use of genres as I read the novel, and as I write this, and was trying to come up with additional ways to look at the\u00a0 constant references.\u00a0 One of the most compelling reasons I came up with for them has to… Continue reading Genre Allusions and the Desire for Moral Simplification<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":930,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions\/930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}