![]() Each narrator matures through the process of composition through self-inscription. Notably, three of his works, Ragtime, Loon Lake and The Book of Daniel, have a consistent plot: “a boy who finds himself in an unacceptable narrative determined by the will of others and who gradually acquires the skills to form his own narrative. This novel not only exhibits Doctorow’s strong repugnance to social injustice but also his successful attempt to fictionalise history. He published using his initials in order to follow in the footsteps of his admired authors: TS Eliot, WH Auden, DH Lawrence, notably. His father named him after his favorite American author Edgar Allan Poe. The Author Barack Obama’s favorite author after Shakespeare (Sarah Crown, UK’s The Guardian), Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is Jewish American who hails from the Bronx. Allusions to the biblical Daniel resonates in this novel: it opens with the epigraph and its concluding words from the biblical book thus, this paper seeks to establish a connection between a Jew named Daniel in the Old Testament Bible and Doctorow’s Daniel and draw a comparative and/or contrastive analysis on the life experiences of both Jews. Furthermore, the novel explores eschatological issues such as man’s agony, fate and human destiny thus, the never-ending quest for the truth by the protagonist, faith in the Divine Being, trust and betrayal, guilt and atonement. This is a personal account of their son’s suffering that shaped his own pathology/being, and his quest for self-identity. ![]() This work is a poignant and scathing journey of a Jewish couple survived by their two children who are unable to forget the past and see themselves as misshapen, if not betrayed, by their parents’ identified legacy. All throughout history they have suffered intolerably and incredibly. ![]() Yet their biblical position did not, do not and will not exempt them from suffering. ( source) As the chosen people of God in the Bible, the Jews are a special people. The novel successfully fictionalises and mirrors a major historical event as it explores the divisive trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Paul and Rochelle Isaacson in the novel), a Jewish couple wrongfully executed for treason by the Truman administration during the Red Menace of the fifties. Set in the 1960’s the novel takes the readers to the height of the US’ anti-communism campaign from the thirties to the fifties and recounts a distressful time in the political history of the US in the twentieth century. Doctorow, author of the sociopolitical novel, The Book of Daniel, his first best known and most important work. ![]() A Reworking of the Biblical Book of Daniel in “The Book of Daniel” (Part 1 of 2) Introduction All history is “composed”, declares E.L. ![]()
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