There is always a problem of historical inaccuracies in fiction. When certain historical events become a part of the narrative (especially when these events are controversial), it is important to understand what they mean in the author’s conception of history and reality in general. Far more important is to understand their place in this conception when we see that the author’s depiction of facts is unusual and what he does seems to be not the reflection of existing reality but the deconstruction of a different one. Terrorism, civil war, separatism – it is hard to remember the themes that would be more complicated and controversial in the modern world, because questions like these never have a certain answer. Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is a good example of a novel that deals with the most important problems of contemporary history.
Anil’s Ghost, first published in 2000, and is dedicated to events of Sri Lankan Civil War. Michael Ondaatje claimed in interviews that his book is not “just about Sri Lanka; it could be Guatemala or Bosnia or Ireland” (Scanlan 302) – so it can be suggested that the author is trying to describe not this particular conflict, but the situation in general. In another interview Ondaatje says: “Anil's Ghost is a more faithful or more nonfictive version. It's a fiction. It is a novel, and it is also a point of view” (Coughlan). Sri Lanka is mentioned as one of the places in which the war “always seems to be there, and nobody goes to it anymore” (Champeon). The conflict that still takes place is set between the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group. Different issues state that at the moment the number of victims is about 80.000 people.
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...every country with the similar circumstances and not only in Sri Lanka. The experience of civil war is reconstructed in destinies of main characters – everyone of them has his personal tragedy and deals with it the way he can. And when neither the executioner nor the victim can be identified, it becomes important to give the identity to at least one of the murdered. It has to be named, and the problem has to be named, too. Through the historical situation the author tries to show us the necessity of personal choice in the times when there is no choice for the nation or the whole country. Anil’s ghost is many different ghosts – ghost of innocent people, who disappeared or died, ghost of the past, which has to be dealt with; ghost of Sarath, who finally becomes a martyr. And these ghosts don’t seem to be Anil’s only. In some reasons they belong to each other.
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.
Literature evolved in the early ages and is still evolving today. Writers Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Guillermo Del Toro all display an uncommon style of literature. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, he writes about the realist fiction that has developed around the nineteenth-century in Russian intelligentsia. Conrad’s novel called The Secret Agent takes place in London in 1886 before the Greenwich bombing. “Pan’s Labyrinth” by Toro takes place after the Spanish Civil War 1944. Each work displays similar qualities across the borders of both time and earth. They each reflect the changing culture of their time period. All three put forth the sentiments of revolution and social change, while tackling the feelings of alienation and navigating the labyrinths of symbolism.
In Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, haunting is a method of sociological research. She argues, “To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it” (7). Ghostly Matters is her attempt to understand the puzzling facts of social life through an analysis of the hauntings surrounding Sabina Spielrein, the desaparecido of Argentina and the lingering impact of racial slavery during the Reconstruction period in the United States.
This essay will try and take the main ideas and compare the differences in attitude towards ghosts, fear of the supernatural and the state of mind of the main characters through the author’s use of language.
ghost come back to life, a random woman who came to fulfill the needs. of the protagonists, and the view of, does it really matter? These possibilities will be discussed throughout the duration of this essay. and it will be left to you to decide what you think. In the support of Beloved actually being the baby ghost re-born, you could use the fact.
Most literary ghosts that occur in stories of lasting interest have to do with things besides themselves. (17)
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
Not all the things and facts seen on the surface correspond to the message of the book! This is a law that should be always kept in mind in order to get the right understanding of the author’s thoughts, especially in terms of non-fiction. The writings “A river runs through it” written by Norman Maclean and “Desert solitaire” by Edward Abbey are bright examples of such phenomenon. On the surface they seem to depict one definite thing whether it is fly-fishing or description of wilderness but both posses the depth of the human soul and its conflicts which may result in isolation or even violence.
In the history of literature, perhaps the most explored genre is the historical novel. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present day, authors have taken historical facts and interpreted them novelistically. When no facts are available, the author may extrapolate missing parts of the story from two sources -- either through the interpretation of the existing scholarly data or through the author's imagination. These two approaches to 'filling in the gaps' of a historical novel can either appease the historian and displease the literary critic or please the literary critic and upset the historian. Very few novelists can produce a historically accurate novel that is also pleasing to a literary critic; to do so would be very difficult because the novelistic plot structure hardly ever follows the structure of truthful historic events. A novelistic writing about a battle in World War Two would be bound to either an accurate portrayal of the events around the main character or a convincing depiction of the people involved. If the author chose to write about turrets, casualty statistics, and troop movements, he would surely sacrifice much of the artistic content of the novel. If the author chose to focus on character and plot, then the writer couldn't portray the event with the specificity it requires. However, the exception to these guidelines appears when a novelist chooses to write a historical novel about a time or a person when large portions of the historical picture is still either unknown or up for scholarly debate. This condition presents itself infrequently to the historical novelist, in circumstances where few people witnessed or spoke about the event, or through an event so ancient tha...
Sri Lanka is a island that is made up of many different ethnicities, the Sinhalese who make up 75% population, the Tamils who make up 11% and 14% others. The differences amoung these groups on the basis of religion, language, and ethnicity has resulted in a 26* year long Civil War that began in July 1983 and ended in May 2009. The war was fought between the Sinhalese dominated state and militant Sri Lanka Tamil separatist movements. This paper will demonstrate how The Sri Lankan civlil war was truly a war against terrorism rather than an attempt at ethnic cleansing. It will do so by understand the history of the civil war, what the LTTE has done and the the Sri Lankan government has done.
The comparison of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” to “Interpreter Of Maladies”, converges upon a single, salient point of thematic interest: issues like double-sided swords in life. Conventionally, a double-sided sword performs both favourable and unfavorable consequences of an issue on the protagonists. Nothing is absolutely positive or negative. The protagonists of these stories, both meet struggles in their lives, but these struggles also provide opportunities for them to solve more important problems they previously had. Double-sided swords most aptly describes the roles of Shoba, Shukumar, Mrs. Das, and Bobby. They all meet matters that also bring positive sides to them. While these people all meet problems in their family, they
In traditional and modern, ghost reflects death and fear, and it never change. In Hamlet, the ghost is a symbol of Hamlet’s father who is killed by Claudius. Its propose is to demand Hamlet to avenge its death. Although the ghost only appears three times in front of Hamlet, it is a specify role to develop the whole story and plot. Through Hamlet, the ghost is the motive to make Hamlet kill Claudius, and the ghost plays a critical role to influence Hamlet.
Zlata Filipovic wrote in her novel, “The people must be the ones to win, not the war, because war has nothing to do with humanity. War is something inhuman.” Conflicts of all manner can be found in all corners of the globe. Ultimately, the brutality of those perpetrating inhumane ideals against those who are different and pose an imagined threat to one’s quality of life is not only a reality found in the past, where it is censured, or locales where war is blatant and explicit, but, also in the communities where such interactions and ideals may be more concealed or masked as average. Injustice and being caught up in futile disputes leaves marks on those who experience such issues in any form. In The Freedom Writers Diary by the Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell, these ideas are brought to the attention of the reader, eliciting the same
It frames a string of inter-related stories from history presented by various narrators. The psychological impact of the opium war upon the mind of the people sometimes surpass the historical facts, which is presented chiefly through main character focalizer Bahram Modi, Neel, Zadig Bay, Robert Chinnery etc. Thus, Amitav Ghosh’s novel exposes the psychic sub-text that lies within and underneath the historical facts. This psychological presentation doesn’t come within the compass of history which is associated only with facts and figures. Through the characters of the novel the writer unravels the impacts of historical events in the lives of people. He presents the aggravated life that the people like Bahram, Ah Fatt, Deeti, Neel, Chinnery has to go through during the opium trade and war period in China. Through different narrative techniques the author offers an opportunity to readers to peep deep into psyche of the inhabitants, traders, officials and others in Canton and to know their past by reconstructing
Githa Hariharan’s second novel The Ghosts of Vasu Master takes a fresh approach to address a number of postcolonial and postmodern issues. It deals with such themes as alternative methods of teaching, maladies and the process of healing, teacher-pupil relationship, and India’s journey as an independent nation. On probing deeper into the novel, however, it may be said that the novel also explores issues concerning women, their longings and their marginal existence in a patriarchal set-up.