Rewriting the Past Saayeh Siahmakoun College

In Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, one of her character’s notes that “we believe the one who has the power... So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, ‘Whose story am I missing?’” (Gyasi 239). With this in mind, novels of historical fiction exist to tell a story that was potentially erased from history. Additionally, authors of these novels aim to draw attention towards the questionability of previously accepted histories. Throughout the development of these stories, authors simultaneously establish backgrounds and histories for their characters, furthering the complexity of the hypothetical story and its function. The characters’ histories, purposefully employed by authors, are used to amplify the present themes within the novels, as seen in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black. Unconventionally, Whitehead and Edugyan construct predetermined histories for their protagonists, Cora Carpenter and George Washington Black, who journey to reshape those histories given to them, furthering each novel’s success in its emphasis on a character’s innate desire to find a sense of home that is uniquely theirs.

Before recognizing the role that each character’s history plays in the novels’...