Jan. 18 Response

“The Garden of Forking Paths” problematizes the authority of history books because there is never one definitive truth when it comes to understanding historical events because of how government/societal oppression, privilege, and/or trauma directly correlates with how we perceive history. There is no unanimous decision when it comes to why things have happened or what the purpose was for because we usually just believe what we are told even if we learn the real reasons later. Even currently, we’re becoming more and more vocal about how our education in history is biased in favor of privileged groups of people, which means we have to seek the truth elsewhere. I think this story is genuinely just asking the reader to be conscious of what space and time means in an academic and textual sense. For example, for white people, “racism” or segregation feels like a completed or finished event that happened a century ago, but it’s really only been sixty-seventy years since segregation ended and black people still have to deal with the effects of segregation. Fiction is just world and scene building based on the writer’s history/personal experiences, but history itself is more focused on time and trends in events.