The Dew Breaker Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Dew Breaker - Assignment Example nt is a building block, ever so delicately placed, that Danticat employed in order to give a hint as to his fathers own relationship with his memories, his past deeds, and his life in general. His fascination with mummies and the past, that they last for thousands of years, reflects his own fascination with his own past, and the dark secrets that lay there. His dark secrets, Danticat wanted to hint at, likewise has the ability to last for thousands of years, haunting his father even as he tries to live a new and placid life in America with his daughter. That anecdote on the grieving practices of the ancient Egyptians is a hint on top of other hints, much like the title of the book is a hint of what his father was in a past life, a torturer and a prison guard of proven cruelty (Danticat; Corbett). We get a sense that this is so, that the mummies are really representative of artifacts of guilt and shame, and in some ways of the actual terror and cruelty that his father, as a â€Å"dew breaker†, inflicted on many people during his watch as prison guard. There is a sense in some analyses of the novel, for instance, that point to this way that Danticat portrays the guilt and the terror that people, both victims and perpetrators, feel all the way to the present, even though they try so hard to live new lives and to escape from their past. This paper asserts that the fascination with the grieving process,and the reference to mummies living on for thousands of years, is in fact a symbolic representation of how, for the torturers like his father,and for the victims of that torture, there is no escaping the past, because the past lives on, like mummies which will not disintegrate and be completely forgotten. This paper asserts that this is a valid point to make. As far as victi ms go, for instance, there is the story that seems to mirror the fathers fascination with the past, and with it an unseen bag of bones, so to speak, that hides in the fathers psyche, a bag of bones