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History In The Waterland

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Waterland is a form of postmodern fiction, which reflects on story-telling, combining both fictive and historical narration (Atilla, 1). The protagonist, Tom Crick, who is also the narrator of the stories, is a history teacher that spends his life trying to discover the mysteries from his past. In the present, he is dismissed from his job, because the school considers history to have little value in the modern world. In one of his last classes, Tom turned his lessons into story-telling sessions, by starting with stories about his personal life and incorporating at the same time his family history and the French Revolution, with the idea to show the meaning of history. While telling the stories, he also questions why we tell stories, how are …show more content…

The fens are land that was once water, as the title suggest. Waterland gives importance to the nature and history to help the narrator find meaning. This is where fiction merges with history to form a fairy-tale. The landscape of the fens in England seems so palpable and unreal. Natural history is cyclical and it needs markers. However, history seems to be more linear, that needs to reach a goal or progress (Atilla, 2 ). Crick tries to draw the attention of his students by combining and mixing the natural and official history throughout his lesson. He is actually not a supporter of a progressive history, because history is not an endless progress (Mandricardo, 125). History repeats itself. In his lesson, he offers a cycle view of history that denies the idea of linearity. Crick claims that “each step forward is followed by a step backward and with each step forward there is an accompanied regression (Mandricardo, …show more content…

He is questioning the meaning and the relevance of historical events. Price wishes to live in the ‘Here and Now’ and embodies all the objections to history and essentially Crick’s stories. However, according to Tom Crick, the past is necessary in order to make meaning of the present. Through analyzing his own past, Tom Crick is trying to show Price that history is in fact relevant. In forming his past into a narrative and by using knowledge that perhaps was previously unavailable, the historian discovers what has been forgotten about the past and brings all the pieces together. Private or public, histories brings together all the amount of data, categories and concepts to form themselves into a narrative (Atilla, 4 ). As Linda Hutcheon specifies, in historiographic metafiction the characters are often seen trying to analyze the data that they have collected. Usually, postmodern fiction uses historical data, which it assimilates in order to lend a feeling of verifiability. However, historiographical metafiction incorporates, but rarely assimilates such data. It plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record, in order to foreground the possible failures of recorded history (Hutcheon,

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