After reading When the Emperor Was Divine, I was left with many unanswered questions. Why did the author choose to leave the characters nameless? What actually happened to the father while he was in jail? Was it really necessary to kill White Dog? Why doesn’t the mother tell the children what’s actually going on? I read the book a second time, and then a third time, and still the answers to these questions both eluded me and smacked me in the face.
Why are the characters nameless? Because the family is supposed to represent an entire nameless community. Because the family is supposed to represent thousands of nameless individuals that were shipped off to internment camps at the request of the United States Government. Because the family was slowly stripped of its identity, slowly stripped of what makes it unique, slowly stripped of what makes it personal.
Why did the mother kill White Dog? Why did she let the bird go? Was it an act of compassion? Of desperation? She killed the dog in order to be compassionate. She didn’t want the dog to suffer. She didn’t want her children to worry about the dog. She didn’t want to worry about the dog. She let the bird go so he could be free. She let the bird go so that he could fly away and take care of himself. She had to tie up loose ends and make sure everything was taken care of before she left for the train.
After reading this novel, there were too many unanswered questions. Too many hidden meanings withing the subtle details of the paragraphs. There were too many ways to interpret events and yet not enough definitive proof.
I definitely enjoyed the writing style.
No comments:
Post a Comment