Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Blog #5

This chapter was very different than the others because it wasn’t directly related to the story or Jeanette or anything. Instead, it is about stories and how they are created to help us remember the past and to keep it alive in a way. They also talk about history and how we think of history as being objective when in reality, historians can make things up just like stories, or they can leave things out if they don’t like those parts of the history. In fact, history can be wrong because it denies what actually happened in the past in certain ways and often this is intentional. In the end, we need to be aware that history and stories are subjective, so we should create our own. The narrator in this chapter uses the image of a sandwich, you can take various parts of stories and histories, and put them together to create your own version. I think the book is trying to tell us that nothing is 100% the way it is explained to us, and that we should be a little doubtful or skeptical of history as being the truth. Since this chapter is not directly related to the story, it was an unusual thing to read at first and I am still figuring out exactly why Winterson decided to include it in the story. I would think that it has to do with the religious upbringing and how that version of the world is not the only one, and many parts of that history have been changed and left out intentionally, making it not 100% true.

Again, since this chapter is unusual, I wasn’t sure which element to focus on but I’ll try to look into the imagery or theme of the Book of Deuteronomy from the bible and how it might be related. From a quick internet search, the Book of Deuteronomy involves sermons from Moses where he tells the story of the journey from Egypt to Israel but it also explains many laws and commandments that we must follow. In a way, this is very different from this chapter of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit because the book tells us that we can create our own versions of history, while the Book of Deuteronomy tells us that there is one version of history that Moses explains, and that we must follow the commandments and laws. This makes the chapter of the book seem like another example of Winterson flipping her religious upbringing upside-down and rejecting it. Instead of following the word of God and accepting their version of history, Winterson is saying that we can do our own thing and make our own versions of stories. I think with Jeanette being a lesbian, the book is telling us that even though the bible says that’s not allowed, we are all allowed to create our own version of that story and we don’t need to blindly follow the word of the bible if it creates problems in our lives. 

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