Reflections on A Pale View Of Hills Lecture and Unreliable Narration

When reflecting on this quarter, I immediately find myself thinking specifically on the lectures surrounding A Pale View of Hills. For me, this was when I really started to consider how difficult it is to adopt the view of the colonized when we live in the colonizing country. I often reflect on Christine's lecture on the competing view of the bombings. That the mushroom cloud, such dominant symbol of nuclear warfare in our culture has no little or no significance to the Japanese is both fascinating and incredibly troubling. Their word for the bomb, Pikadon captures the immediacy and the indescribable nature of the bomb from their perspective. It's something that has made me consider more deeply the types of filters my understandings of such events have gone through.

As someone who's hoping to be accepted to the creative writing concentration, I also took the opportunity to try and study how unreliable narrators can function within a text. Obviously, our analysis of these texts were focused on reading them strictly in a colonial and post-colonial context, as such the mechanics of the prose were not always our biggest concern. But I still found myself considering carefully how information can be relayed to the reader through misinformation, how characters can be established by their voice, and texts can be crafted to be read against, to be analyzed and questioned for a full understanding of their meaning. It's an aspect of literature that I've become really interested in, and something I hope to incorporate in my own work in the future.

-Thomas Damgaard