I had never taken a course with Christine prior to this class.  I’m graduating this year and wishing I had had more of an opportunity to experience her teaching style.  The concept of unreliable narration was an interesting lens to use to confront the issues we approached in this class, and was incredibly engaging.  I have never felt so trusted to come to my own conclusions in a literature course. 

I loved the piece of the course centered on A Pale View of Hills.  The difference of perspective between how America understood the bombings, and what the people present experienced.  How neither of these views recognizes the true ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what occurred.  I wrote my paper on Ishiguro’s novel, but it wasn’t until a couple days later in lecture that I felt like I understood at least an element of the problem in the novel, that I was attempting to address in my paper.  The whole time the narrator is grappling with guilt, through an unreliable and constructed memory.  The reader realizes there is some element of trauma affecting the narrator’s ability to recall the past accurately.  She completely warps her past and yet cannot escape the guilt she feels for her daughter’s suicide.  In the paper I was able to connect Keiko with the concept of the future in Yoneyama’s article and the fixation of female characters with the motherhood concepts from the same article.  But I realized later that I didn’t really address the amount of guilt the narrator was dealing with, and when reviewing the importance of perspective in terms of the bombs in lecture I realized the connection I could have made.  Considering the way the experience of a nuclear bomb would appear from the ground level, it feels as we said like a natural disaster, something beyond humanity caused it.  When you are experiencing the event, I doubt it is easy to care or understand why this is happening, or because of who.  There is something about this that I think applies to the complicity that the narrator feels in Keiko’s death, because she cannot find anyone else who is at fault in her constructed memory, as hard as she tries.  This is a concept I wish I had more fully conceived as I was writing my paper. 

A smaller point that I will carry with me is the fact that unreliable does not mean false.  As we discussed Joe Sacco’s work and even again, A Pale View of Hills, you realize maybe there is nothing reliable that is put into the world as history.  And it is especially hard to find a witness or source that experienced the whole event reliably.  However, events and footnotes leave an impact, shown in Ishiguro’s work, on the human psyche, and these effects don’t stop with the people who experienced them, but ripple out through generations.  Maybe this is another concept I haven’t fully developed, but it seems significant to note that what humans do to each other is not something that can always be understood clinically, or factually.  Maybe it is okay to remember experience-by-experience, human-to-human.  It’s easy to forget people exist in these different perspectives and international engagements.

Still thinking on these.  Amazing course.