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Daniel's Death Thesis

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E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel is centered around Daniel Isaacson, a doctoral student whose thesis aims to discover the truth behind his parents’ death. Paul and Rochelle Isaacson were tried, convicted, and executed for conspiracy to commit espionage when Daniel and his sister, Susan, were still children. Their death, as well as their reputation, left behind deep scars in both their children, scars that manifest themselves in different ways, but that nevertheless disturb and upset their lives. Daniel, wanting to make sense of these scars, sets out to document a past that leads to his mother and father’s execution. But, as the German philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin declares, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the …show more content…

In the section entitled “Bintel Brief,” a kind of letter to the editor written in the voice of Daniel’s grandmother, she recounts the pain and suffering she endured early in life, how she fled “from this terrible animal oppression,” of the “Czarist maniacs,” only to spend the rest of her life in crippling poverty in America (Doctorow 64). But she could not flee from the past as she had fled from her country, and is driven mad by the memories. In moments of lucidity, she gives Daniel pennies, likening this act to the transfer of “the sum of her life” and her experiences to him (71). Here, Doctorow creates the transmission of history, more specifically the grandmother’s history, into a sort of tradition or ritual, “ritual being an artful transfer of knowledge,” this knowledge including the knowledge of the past’s brutality (71). She tells Daniel’s that the placing of the penny in his hand, like the “placing of the burden on the children,” is “a family tradition,” a tradition that can be transferred from mother to daughter or, more generally, an old generation onto a new one (70). She places the burden of the “animal” barbarism that she inherited from her homeland first onto her daughter. Rochelle, seeing her mother’s mistreatment and exploitation, becomes disenchanted and enraged with America’s political system. In her rage she …show more content…

Doctorow links--by way of structure and word choice--the “ritual” involving the grandmother’s pennies to the ritual of drawing and quartering. The section on this form of execution, appearing almost directly after the grandmother’s story, describes in explicit detail how a criminal was slowly tortured until “the final act of the ritual was then performed, a hacking of the body into four parts, the quarters then being thrown to the dogs” (73-4). This savage tradition marks a rather dark period in English history, and though it has been discontinued, its brutality can still be found in countless other societies. Further along in the novel, Daniel describes the barbarism of other civilizations’ past torture techniques, all committed in the name of justice. He includes the practice of Japanese smoking, Russian knouting, burning at the stake that infected both Europe and America, and finally electrocution, the mode of execution to which Paul and Rochelle were condemned. Though the method of the punishment changes over time and place, the brutality remains. It remains, even in twentieth century, even in the United States, because it cannot be wiped from history’s memory, just as his own brutal past cannot be wiped from Daniel’s

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