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     As soon as I started reading Kindred it had a quick impact on me: the way I view the era of slavery in the United States, and also the way that I understood the story. It made me think a lot more about how people during the time thought about slavery. This is a large contrast from what I have learned in school because in school I learned mostly about what happened and the course of events due to what people thought of slavery generally. What is left out is feelings people experience from day to day due to the oppressive system; feelings are rarely discussed and never in much detail. Kindred emphasizes social perception and communication on an individual level which helped me understand more about what really happened during those times.     I think the most important feature of the novel that helps the reader connect to the story and understand how people feel is that it connects to present day. It starts with the prologue; at the beginning, you read about...

     Ishmael Reed has unique writing style in Mumbo Jumbo . It is unlike any other book I've read. The most notable characteristic of his style is that everything seems to be unorthodox. They perspective in which the story is told differs from most books, the formatting is atypical, two of the chapters are labeled the same, there are no quotes when characters are speaking, etc. At first, I was constantly confused with everything going on, but after a while my brain came to accept the changes. So why does Reed include all of these odd details?     One of the most odd ways Reed tells the story, is through the telling of the detective story to discover the text. Reed uses evidence that makes no sense, like when Black Herman dreamed the location of the book. Typical detective stories follow clear evidence and is easy to follow for a common person. The most unordinary thing about the detective story is that it has no conclusion. Nearly all traditional detective stori...

    In Ragtime, many of the characters and their actions can represent common viewpoints during the time period. For example, Father likely represents the traditional viewpoint coming into the Ragtime era. Mother on the other hand, represents the more progressive ideas that were new during the time period. As the time period progressed, the ideas became stronger, similar to the way she became more independent after Father's trip to the arctic. Eventually, by the end of the time period, most of the traditionally ideas die out, similar to the how Father literally dies.     This correlation may be an explanation to why the novel ends so abruptly. At the beginning of the novel, there are no disturbances to the  traditional viewpoint. Once Coalhouse and Sarah are introduced though, everything changes. This is when we see the effect they have on society. Their actions may kind of represent the influential social events that happened during the Ragtime Era, and th...

      In chapter 14 Father returns home from his trip to the arctic. The first thing he notices is that Mother is holding a stranger's baby. Doctorow writes, "He wandered through the house finding everywhere signs of his own exclusion" (109). Father notices many other differences in the household from before he left. This change surprises him because it is his own home and he has always been up-to-date in everything that is going on in it. So what does this mean in the context of the historical time period?     Another change Father notices is the role Mother plays in their family and in the community. She has become much more independent and confident in her identity and behavior. Mother has started making decisions for the company, she decided to take legal responsibility for Sarah and the baby, she has started reading literature from more perspectives, and she has become less "vigorously modest" in the bedroom. This relates to the time period, as this was a p...