Brincando nos escombros: a infância contando histórias

Abstract

The Book of Daniel, by E. L. Doctorow, beginning with the title, gives clues about its innumerable possibilities of interpretation. The plot fictionalizes the life of the children of the Rosenberg couple, protagonist of a foggy episode in the history of American McCarthyism, during the Cold War. The story has as narrator the firstborn, Daniel, who would be better able to unravel the truth of the facts, for having participated in them in childhood. With this premise, we bring the Benjaminian thought about the narrator, making considerations of the pertinence or not of witnessing the facts to better tell the story. Our aim is to share a possible childish interpretation of the construction of historical sense as a liberating and revealing factor of a delimited social context, namely, political repression in the United States in the 1950s. Our conclusions about the delinquents attitudes of a young person morally and emotionally unstructured symbolizing an entire society disfigured by the terror implanted by the government. By the way, the same logic that guides Daniel's actions in his psychotic state guides also the government. We observe the connections between History and history narrated with the Daniel’s experiences as a child. His positions, relative to history, help to mature a look at his status as object and subject of history, opening a tunnel for a possible childlike identity as the source of the story