Our discussion in class Tuesday really made me think on the importance of documentation. Documentation has unspeakable power and use.
One use of documentation is to identify someone. As US citizens we all are required to have documentation at both birth and death. We even have social security cards with specific numbers assigned to us. Throughout an American life we are required to obtain a substantial amount of documentation for a variety of things.
The use of documentation to identify someone ties in heavily with our reading of the Freedom Papers. The narrator is looking at documentation to form stories. It was the documents that fueled the stories to form correlations to the time period. I am amazed at how these stories were formed.
The author uses the documents to form stories but what if there weren't any documents? In a world without documentation family histories and events would have to be both remembered and told orally. This opens the door for stories to be told incorrectly, forgotten, or in our narrator's case, draw conclusions and make them up.
No comments:
Post a Comment