All posts from now on are for history as fiction

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Nicholas Branch and the Futility of Evidence

     In Libra ’s plot, Nicholas Branch takes the role of a parallel character, who looks back on the main storyline we live through with Oswald and Everett, except he does it through artifacts and evidence. When we first meet him, Branch has been trying to write a secret history of JFK’s assassination for the CIA for over 15 years. As the reader moves through Lee Harvey Oswald’s life and Win Everett’s plan with the CIA, they watch the events leading up to the assassination unfold to create a narrative explanation for Oswald’s involvement in President Kennedy’s death. While the reader goes through these plots, they also get flashes of Nicholas Branch’s current state as he tries to understand the events by working backwards through evidence. However, at the end of the book, while the reader finally comes to understand the story behind the assassination, Branch descends further into a hole of confusion, surrounded by piles upon piles of evidence, none of which reveals the tr...
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Rufus: "Her Little Jackass"

  The main focus of Kindred is Dana and Rufus, and the evolving yet also stagnant relationship they share throughout the novel. The story is told through Dana’s first person perspective, so as readers, we get to hear her inner monologue. However, we do not get the same viewpoint with Rufus, and we only see him through Dana’s eyes. While Rufus’s personality is objectively different from other white characters in the 18th century setting such as his father Tom Weylin, Dana’s characterization of Rufus is heavily affected by her unique familial ties with him, and it blurs the lines of Rufus’s true motivations and limits.   At the beginning of Kindred when Rufus is still a child, he’s a generally sympathetic character. The racist standards of the time are made apparent by his usage of the n word, however, he also listens to Dana when she tells him not to use it, shows interest and excitement towards Dana’s relationship with Kevin, and seems to have respect for her. With the added k...
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The Running Man

When Invisible Man’s narrator retells the experiences of his past, the difference between the narrator’s current self and his past self is vast. The two of them have contrasting views of their life and aspirations. While the current narrator has discovered and accepted his “invisibility” as a black man in a racist society, in his retelling of his life, his past self does not realize his invisibility, and he believes he can make a change in the world. However, as the story progresses, the narrator starts to understand how the progress he believes himself to be making is not progress at all, but is exactly what is required of him to keep the oppressive society he lives in unchanged and balanced. In the first chapter of Invisible Man, after the narrator endures the nightmarish Battle Royale, he finally gets to read the speech he had come to the event for in the first place. In front of his town’s “leading white citizens,” he delivers his speech badly bruised and swallowing blood, still ho...
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