Introduction:

“Telling a half that has hardly ever been told.” (“Kei Miller”)

On May 15, 1918, Henry Johnson, a private in the all-black 369^th United States Infantry Regiment, armed with only a knife, protected both himself and a wounded comrade from a German attack on the Western Front of World War I. On June 2, 2015, nearly eighty-six years after Johnson’s death, President Barack Obama awarded him the Medal of Honor (“Medal of Honor: Sergeant Henry Johnson”). This award raises two questions: why was Johnson, the first American to receive the French Croix de Guerre (Nelson 107), not given military honors by his own country sooner?

Through the constant transformation and waning status of an intertwined English family, Mary Shelley’s 1826 post-apocalyptic novel The Last Mantackles the consequences of the Anthropocene and bears particular significance for modern questions of gender and nature. As the narrator, Lionel, recounts his story, he centers his relationship with the romantic, selfless hero Adrien, alternately idolizing and forgoing his own wife.

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a treatise on feminism that was regarded as a central fixture of the feminist movement for decades. The work sought to liberate women from the oppression imposed by male-dominated society, arguing against the categorization of women as “the Other,” the pure valuation of beauty, and the trend of defining the female identity based on feminine biology. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of films emerged that claimed to fulfill de Beauvoir’s conception of the liberated woman.

In novels such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, we meet unreliable narrators with traumatic pasts. As these novels develop, it is revealed that the narrators exclude important facts, feelings, and descriptions of characters and circumstances. This leaves us, as readers, to wonder why the narrator does not accurately depict themselves nor the world around them. Essentially, as we encounter unreliable narrators in fiction, we raise the questions of cause and effect.

In Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, the very first scene is one where the eponymous character, a young Irish orphan living in India, resolves a linguistic mismatch. A Tibetan lama asks a policeman for directions to the Lahore Museum in Urdu, but the policeman speaks only Punjabi, thus rendering the lama “helpless” (Kipling 12) until Kim steps in to translate. Unsurprisingly, the theme of the power of language continues throughout the novel, further complicated by the introduction of English to the mix of Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi.

In James Olney’s 1984 essay “I Was Born: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” Olney addresses that most slave narratives follow the same format, which makes them both straightforward and repetitive. He argues that these strict conventions are essential because slave narratives exist for ex-slaves to add their story to the ever-growing testament about slavery, not for the author to explore and take ownership of their history.

Growing up is a universal part of the human experience. A whole genre of literature, called the bildungsroman, follows this path from adolescence to adulthood. The term bildungsroman was not widely used until around 1870, but it was first coined in 1817 and aptly labels a long list of works stretching from the end of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century ("Bildungsroman"). The root word bildung translated from German into English can refer to “development,” “education,” “apprenticeship,” “self-culture,” “acculturation,” or “formation” (Lyons 1).