The Authors Are Messing With Us (Part 2)

I wrote my last blog mainly about what I expected of the author’s in the books we will read

throughout the rest of the semester. There were a few themes I mentioned. Mainly, the themes the

books encompass, and how the authors continue to mess with the reader. One of the main themes of

Mumbo Jumbo was how the Wallflower Order and the Atonists aimed to hold back and get rid of Jes

Grew. In essence, this was a white versus black social battle. The Atonists fight to hold down African
American culture and keep it out of culture. The very end of the book reminds me a lot of

Ragtime, and makes me think that this is a common theme of history as fiction novels. The novel

ends with the narrative, “Time is pendulum, Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes

around.” (218). This immediately reminded me of how we talked about how the Black Panthers were

transported through time and dropped into the Ragtime narrative with Coalhouse Walker’s crew. The

social issues presented in each book’s narrative directly related to the time period the novel was

published. Both of these novels were published not too long after the civil rights era, so it makes

sense to have these socially relevant topics. I don’t know if this is a part of history as fiction, but

judging what I already know about Slaughterhouse Five, I think it might be. By “this,” I mean using

history in fiction to depict social criticisms of both the time period of the book but also the time

period it was published. In short, Ragtime shows that Black Panther-esque characters and fighting

for civil rights can be applied to both the 1910s and the 1960s. The racism of Conklin is still relevant

to people of the 1970s who just had to fight against racism for civil rights in the 1960s. For Mumbo

Jumbo, I notice that the theme is about racism in a similar way. Abdul is murdered in a racist fashion

by Vampton. Vampton spends much of the novel working to using black people as an object to

destroy black culture. I think that as our novels are published in different times the social issues they

tackle will be going with the time accordingly. I already know some about Slaughterhouse Five, so I

think you guys should be looking out for the social issue presented in the novel. There are lots of

parallels between the two novels we have read so far, both dealing with issues of race. As far as the

author messing with us, we talked about how the text is supposed to be in kind of vernacular, but

what I think was the important part of how he messed with us was how he ordered the story. PaPa

LaBas knew the outcome of the story with many pages to go, and we only learned how it would turn

out toward the very end. So the detective aspect of the story is a little different. I’m curious about

how the authors will play with us for the rest of the class.