“He Wasn’t a Liar”- “Here He Lyes”
The diction on Captain Smith’s grave surreptitiously insinuates that his writing is believable and ingenuous. However, Jill Lepore asserts, “Ah, but don’t believe it…Even his (Smith) mishaps prove his valor : who could have survived so may sea-fights , shipwrecks, mutinies, deserted islands, musket wounds, betrayals, prisons, and gashes gotten while jousting, except a man whose coat-of-arms depicted the severed , turbaned heads of three Turkish army officers he defeated in back-to back duels in Transylavania and whose motto-embalzone on his shield-sounds like a title of a James Bond Film set in Elizabethan England.” Lepore’s remarks conjecture that most of Smith’s writings are embroidered to portray him as a protagonist. Lepore deconstructs Smith’s proclamations to validate that the avowals on the epitaph are not earnest.
‘Franklin’s Perfection’-“The Way to Wealth”
Jill Lepore explicates, “ He( Franklin) carried with him a book in which he kept track, day by day, of whether he had lived according to thirteen virtues, including Silence, which he hoped to cultivate “ to break a habit I was getting into of Prattling, Punning and Joking. What made Franklin great was how nobly he strived for perfection; what makes him almost impossibly interesting is how far short he fell of it.” Evidently, Franklin committed his being to being impeccable based on how he endeavored to accomplish ‘the thirteen virtues’; his conscientiousness would have augmented his faultlessness but it did not. The irony of Franklin’s flawlessness specifies the integral blemishes in all humans, which Franklin would not bypass.
