Instruction
READ INSTRUCTION THEN ANSWER PROMPT ABOVE:
Our reading so far in Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea has introduced us to the inhabitants of B-Mor, a small community of workers from New China who grow fish and tomatoes for the wealthy, high-status members of society who live in the Charters. The residents of B-Mor tell us the legend of Reg, who is taken from the B-Mor community under mysterious circumstances, and Fan, who leaves B-Mor voluntarily to search for Reg in the open countries where people live difficult lives between the Charters and production facilities like B-Mor. (You’ve probably noticed this as a trend in cli-fi novels: when resources get scarce, the powerful members of a society build walls and separate themselves from the others in their communities, while the less-powerful are stuck on the outside. In Bacigalupi these enclaves were called arcologies; in Atwood, they were called compounds; in Butler, there wasn’t a formal term, but Lauren Olamina’s family begins the novel in a neighborhood fortified by a wall, as well; and here in Lee, we have the Charters. As you read this week, you might start thinking about why these authors from different backgrounds, cultures, and parts of the world share a conviction that humanity will inevitably divide society into the rich/powerful and everyone else.)
We’ve talked a fair amount in this course about narrative styles — how an author tells his or her story. Lee presents us with a very unusual narrative voice in this novel: the story is told not by an individual, but by a collective group of B-Mor residents. As the tale goes on, we start to realize the significance of this choice. Unlike much of the other fiction we’ve read, On Such a Full Sea does not present us with a single hero intent on changing or saving the world. Instead, the narrator(s) of this novel question the value of the individual in society: “The question, then,” they tell us, “is whether being an ‘individual’ makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care. Did Fan care about such things? We can’t be certain” (Lee 3). Writing about On Such a Full Sea in the New Yorker, Joanna Biggs points out that