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Is Annie's Identity In The Book Of The Dead By Edwidge Danticat

614 Words3 Pages

A wanted criminal. That is what Annie’s father in “The Book of the Dead” by Edwidge Danticat represents in reality. He is a former prison guard in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship that tortured prisoners and has a visible scar as a reminder of this time in his life. He tortured others and is now hiding his past in fear of punishment. He fled Haiti and avoids telling the truth regarding his hometown in fear of being traced. He is a wanted criminal eluding justice. He followed orders that harmed humans and performed criminal acts. Yet, as a character we do not hate him, but we sympathize with him. Three parts of his identity as a prison guard play a role in this: his development into a torturer, his PTSD, and his hiding. These three …show more content…

While the story does not share any specific horror stories of him torturing prisoners, it does state that when he stumbled into his future wife, he “was about to go back and do something bad, very bad” (Danticat 197). The story also describes the torture that Gabrielle Fonteneau’s father had to suffer through. One of the guards did not like him scratching the walls, “so he pulled out all his fingernails with pliers” (Danticat 196). This horror is told in a fictional story in this case, yet this cruelty is also seen in real life. The Stanford Prison experiment, conducted in 1971, studied the psychology of the prisoner/prison guard relationship by randomly assigning college male volunteers as prisoners or prison guards. The prison guards received no training, but they became ruthless; they chained the prisoners’ legs together and put bags over their heads on bathroom runs, took away their clothes, beds, and showers as a form of punishment, and even limited their eating (Zimbardo). The behavior became so extreme that this two-week experiment was shut down after six days. The lesson learned was that when regular people are given too much power, they transform into oppressors (Konnikova). This was seen in the case of Annie’s father; he was given power over others and he turned into an abuser of this power and tortured the

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