Week 4 Reading Response- Sham

Like Lucy, I focused on the different narrative styles that Keene employed to tell Carmel’s story, and found transitions between styles incredibly jarring. We begin with a third person historical point of view, akin to how one writes in academic papers, to a third person narrative, where we lack a complete understanding of what Carmel knows. Then we transition to reading her journals, which help paint a better picture of what she can communicate, to her first person narrative at the end, which is incredibly precise and forces you to realize the depth of the stories she could tell. We slowly become more intimate with her in a way that is almost absurd; she is a mute girl that we can fully understand by the end of the narrative. She, like Hartman explains, is telling an impossible story, and this last section forces you to further grapple with that idea. Like Chloe mentioned, this is further exemplified by the idea that this entire story is written in the space of an asterisk, stating that no definitive records of the school exist, and yet, somehow, we read. In that context, I found this narrative to be incredibly haunting; the idea that we have erased so many people and the only stories we are given are stories of people who have been chosen. More often or not, that choice is because of what has been done to them, rather than as actors with their own agency. These narratives are just our attempt to deal with the idea that we have lost these stories forever,and that we can never lose sight of that.

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