topic:Both of these authors describe their pasts as occurring in a time and place very different from the present. Why are Gosse and Ondaatje so insistent on the foreignness of the past?
Please, any criticism/suggestion is welcome!! if anyone has read those two books please give me any suggestion to improve my essay! thank you so much!! :)
Time is something that changes everything; through time, memories fade, ideas reform, and society changes its expectations. These changes due to passing of time are neither stoppable nor preventable. Thus, time can be used to explain things such as forgetfulness overtime or the distinctive characteristics of people from different generations. In Father and Son, the author Edmund Gosse emphasizes the foreignness between past and present to use it as a support for himself in the argument against his father. By stating that he and his father are from two distinct epochs with different temperaments that promoted unique consciences, he ascribes the contrast between his father and himself to the lapsing of time. Gosse and his father possess contrasting beliefs and ways of thinking because they are from different times and were thus exposed to different ideas. However, his father fails to embrace changing ideas unfamiliar to his own. Gosse justifies that he himself with opinions that match the prevalent ideas in society is right, and his father, failing to adapt to the dynamic society, is wrong. In Running in the Family, the author Michael Ondaatje offers foreignness of the past as an evidence of imperfection and unreliability of memory. Ondaatje's writing does not give a continuous description of events, but rather skips around in time, giving anecdotes in fragments and omitting essential details. With this kind of deliverance, he effectively conveys the limitation of memory because the text itself is like examining memory which is imprecise, vague, and incomplete. Since history exists through people's memories, flawed memory leads to fragmented history, and thus a foreign past. In each of their autobiographies, both authors relate foreignness of past with time; Gosse uses it as a yet another way to defend himself against his argument with his father, whereas Ondaatje uses is as an evidence to prove memory is imperfect and flawed.
Gosse parallelizes the foreignness of past and present to the contrasting ways in which he and his father interpret the world. As he says "this book is a record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences, and almost two epochs," (Gosse 5) he states the cause of the huge contrast in their ways is primarily due to time. Differences between him and his father were amplified because they lived in times in which antithetic ideas were prevalent. It is only natural that he and his father have radically divergent ways of thinking. He contrasts them though saying, "one was born to fly backward, the other could not help being carried forward," (Gosse 5) referring to himself as the one being carried forward and his father as the one flying backward. Gosse considers that continuously accepting new ideas led to his advancement, while his father's secluding himself to solely religious ideas led to his intellectual atavism.
For instance, his father understands why Darwin's theory was correct, "but he allowed the turbid volume of superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one step in service of truth, and then drew back in an agony, and accepted the servitude of error." (Gosse 61) The foreignness of the past that Gosse mentions is used to strengthen his assertion that his views of the world are correct. To Gosse, his father's belief is an error, and his unwillingness to accept non-Christian ideas is a hindrance that obstructs him from acquiring new knowledge. Gosse compares his father and his ideas to the foreign past, and himself and his own ideas to the present. Because Gosse's father fails to adjust to the idea of a changing society with changing knowledge, foreignness of the past is yet another aspect Gosse uses to supports his part of argument in Father and Son.
Ondaatje exhibits unique writing styles in Running in the Family to prove that imperfection of memory results in inaccurate history. Anecdotes provided in the text are fragments of stories he had heard as a child. Since Running in the Family is mostly a reproduction of Ondaatje's own memory - imperfect and flawed, reading the text allows readers to experience the discontinuity and unreliability of human memory. Many of Ondaatje's anecdotes fail to provide information for all five of the essential who, what, when, where, and why. For example,
We are having a formal dinner. String hoppers, meat curry, egg ruling, papadams, potato curry. Alice's date chutney, seeni sambol, mallung and brinjals and iced water. All the dishes are on the table and a good part of the meal is spent passing them around to see each other. It is my favorite meal - anything that has string hoppers and egg ruling I eat with a lascivious hunger. For dessert there is buffalo curd and jiggery sauce - a sweet honey made from the coconut, like maple syrup but with a smoky taste. (Ondaatje 114)
this paragraph contains needless details in the type of foods that were available, but provides no information about more important aspects such as who he ate with and for what occasion they gathered together. Moreover, in some cases, the title of the chapter has no connection with the content whatsoever, but instead contains some arbitrary details. For example, the chapter titled "honeymoon" has no information relevant to honeymoon, but instead mentions things that occurred in the public: "tennis championships had ended," (Ondaatje 29) "women were still trying to steal the body of Valentino," (Ondaatje 29) and "Charlie Chaplin was in Ceylon." (Ondaatje 29) Through this autobiography, Ondaatje intends to show that limitation of memory sometimes omits important pieces of information and thus leads to inaccurate history.
Foreignness of the past in Running in the Family is important because Ondaatje presents the foreignness as evidence of limitation of memory. History is made by people; people write history with memories. Consequently, memory is what constitutes history. When that memory is flawed, events of the past become unclear and history is blurred. Often, connections between past and present are made by people in attempts to better understand either what happened then or what is happening now, but vague history means that the past and the present will be harder to connect. Ondaatje is stating precisely that lapsing of time dulls the details in memory and states the foreignness of the past as evidence. "I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or gesture," (Ondaatje 176) admits Ondaatje near the end of his autobiography in the section of acknowledgements. By this, he means that the history he provided was not the actual truth because it was filtered by his memories. As the history of Sri Lanka was delivered to readers via Ondaatje's memories, some details were lost unintentionally, and that no longer makes this text a fully true historical account.
Both Edmund Gosse and Michael Ondaatje use foreignness of the past to support each of their view points they present in their autobiographies. In Father and Son, Gosse uses foreignness to support his argument against his father, and in Running in the Family, Ondaatje offers foreignness of past as an evidence of imperfect memory. In addition, Gosse and Ondaatje both relate foreignness with time; the passing of time is the fundamental reason why foreignness can occur.
Time is something that changes everything
I guess I have to criticize this for being a cliche. "Time changes everything."---You hear people say this all the time, so I think you should find a different way to express the same idea when you start your essay.
Oh, I know what to do!
Time is something that changes everything; t With time, memories fade, ideas reform, and society changes its expectations.
That is a good way to start it.
The essay has lots of good examples, but I encourage you to add 1 or 2 sentences to the conclusion paragraph. In that conclusion, there is no reflection or evaluation, just statement of fact. So... add one more sentence! :-)
