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Popular Culture Review
betterment of empowered white supremacists. South African whites would have
fit in better in the past, she thinks to herself Tellingly, Dana’s connections
between the holocaust, 19th-century American slavery, and apartheid in South
Africa expose the cyclical nature of history and reinforce Elie Weisel’s call to
remember lest we forget, since a person is as much defined by what she forgets
as by what she remembers.
Dana’s inability to separate her present self from her self in the past
symbolizes the intricate connection we sustain to what has come before. Author
Connie Willis organizes Doomsday Book to reinforce the interconnectedness of
humans in time within one’s consciousness. The story of Kivrin in 1348
entwines with the story of Mr. Dunworthy in 2052. Told as if they were
happening simultaneously, though one occurs 700 years before the other, a
comparison of the two times reveals significant parallels. From an
archaeological dig of the village to which Kivrin will travel, London of 2052 is
exposed to a previously extinct influenza virus. As people pile up and die in the
city’s hospitals, people are piling up and dying in plague infested England.
Medieval peoples believe the disease to be God’s curse, and nothing has
changed in London of 2052. Preachers and laymen read Biblical passages to the
infected about God punishing sins through disease. The way Kivrin’s doctor. Dr.
Ahrens, sacrifices herself to care for the sick in 2052 parallels the sacrificial
resolve of Father Roche in his village in 1348.
Though much has changed between 1348 and 2052, humanity’s spirit
remains the same. To some extent, both Kindred and Doomsday Book speak of
the inadequacy of textual representation to communicate past into the present.
Unfortunately, texts remain our primary way of remembering, but book
knowledge is not enough to fully understand people in time. To understand the
past one must engage with it emotionally. Until Kivrin and Dana form intimate
friendships, they remain emotionally distanced from their experiences. Minutes
after returning from her first journey to Maryland, Dana’s memory of her
adventure begins to fade until it becomes “like something I saw on
television. .
In spite of balancing themselves between ideas of past and
present, one of the most significant factors in the molding of the characters’
identities is the people with whom they come to identify. Dana and Kivrin form
deeper connections to people in the past than with those in the present. Rather
than being exclusive to any particular moment in time, personal identity
becomes an accumulation of emotional connections within one’s personal
narrative. Memory of shared experiences is the key to accessing those
connections.
At first, Dana and Kivrin find it relatively easy to fit into their respective
times because both act as observers performing assigned roles. Only when
Kivrin and Dana establish community do they stop acting. Kivrin becomes
attached to six-year old Agnes, not only because she has been given the job to
care for Agnes which establishes her place in the family, but also because Agnes
accepts Kivrin without reservation. Too young to question Kivrin’s strange dress