Parts of the Whole

In the novels that we have read this semester, there has been a pattern of stark contrasts used to illustrate, on a deep emotional level, both the gross inequities of social, economic, and educational status and humans rights abuses in the United States and other countries around the world.  Often, the literary device used to drive these points has been synecdoche, or metonymy, the use of a part to represent the whole.

            There are many ways used to illustrate how this device is used; for example, the press often uses the phrase “the White house spoke” in reference to a statement made by the executive branch of the government.  An author might also discuss ‘fifty sail,’ with ‘sail’ actually being representative of an entire ship.*

In When the Emperor Was Divine, this is used on a very human level—four characters, the mother, father, daughter, and son—are a part of the whole Japanese-American population subjected to years of torture and deprivation without any concrete evidence to justify their displacement.  The characters in Julie Otsuka’s novel are never given names, never identified by any strikingly unique characteristic.  The use of this device is most apparent in the last two chapters, which represents the loss of any individual identity through the internment process—the last chapter is written from the first person plural point of view, whereas the previous three were written in first person singular, each through the eyes of either the mother, daughter, or son.  The same phenomenon occurs during the father’s confessions at the end of the novel; it is clear that he is speaking on behalf of all the unjustly imprisoned Japanese-American men.

Cynthia Ozick does something similar in the very first pages of The Shawl, the first of two short stories in her novel of the same title.  The image that Otsuka creates early on is of just three frail girls—Rosa, Stella, and baby Magda—marching down a dusty road.  It is quite clear that these three are not walking by choice, but out of forced necessity; they have no choice but to keep moving forward.  The threatening force of which they are frightened seems almost hypothetical, a larger looming force that could be lurking around any corner.  In the third paragraph, however, Ozick writes, “Rosa, floating, dreamed of givin Magda away in one of the villages.  She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road.  But if she moved out of line they might shoot.  And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it” (4)?

And so Rosa and Magda are actually representing a whole line of people being driven from their homes.  They are not, in fact alone, but two of many.  While this is not such a clear use of synecdoche as the representation of a recognizable symbol for a larger body of people, it does clearly reveal to the reader the plight of so many, on the level of an individual—this makes these stories, Otsuka’s and Ozick’s alike, so much more powerful; the readers can connect with the characters on an individual level to understand a larger injustice that, years later, it is easy to be detached from.