I was found myself rereading passages of Hartman’s piece over and over because it seemed so critical to the questions this class inherently raises about representing suffering and injustice as writers. Her piece presented various tensions and questions and moral dilemmas around writing the narratives of silenced people, and refused to wrap a bow around this tension by providing us a clear answer. I thought Keene’s changing narrative tone aided him to, in Hartman’s words, “tell impossible stories.” Hartman calls on writers to “expose and exploit the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history, by which I mean the requirements of narrative, the stuff of subjects and plots and ends” (10). This refusal to provide as satisfying story or narrative—that is, to wrap up the conflict or violence in some sort of bow whereby readers can make sense of it—shows throughout Keene’s narrative of Carmel. There were certainly points in which I, as a reader, was confused about who was speaking as the tone of the piece changed fluidly. Closer to the beginning of the narrative, Keene’s spoke about the slaves with Carmel on the plantation in the second person. He broke up this narrative in different sections, at points asking philosophical questions about the role of duty and ethical responsibility that slaves might consider before revolting or resisting. Then, the story develops to reveal Carmel as its main narrator. Throughout the piece, she experiences agency and power in strange ways; she draws anonymously, driven by some overwhelming force to do so. And in the end of the story, she exercises magical powers hinted at before only in the story of her mother. This type of agency and expression provided to Carmel is one we can’t necessarily wrap our heads around. Sometimes it seemed to come out of the blue in the story. I found this to be a really effective way of  “exposing and exploiting the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history” that drive storytellers to create a more “cohesive” subject and plot.