64 pages • 2 hours read
Richard FlanaganQuestion 7
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Historical Connections Across Space and Time
In Question 7, Flanagan traces connections between events in history and his personal family history. He draws together seemingly disparate elements such as the work of H. G. Wells, the creation of the atomic bomb, his father’s time as a POW, British colonialism in Tasmania, and his own life to show how historical events connect in unexpected ways. To illustrate this concept, Flanagan uses an extended metaphor of a chain reaction where a nucleus splits into two nuclei that in turn triggers another nucleus to split into two nuclei and so forth. Similarly, in Flanagan’s telling, a historical event triggers myriad other events that in turn ripple across space and time.
Flanagan builds the chain reaction motif into the structure of the text itself. He notes how H. G. Wells’s description of the atomic bomb in The World Set Free inspired scientists and policymakers like Winston Churchill. It also resonated with Wells’s “disciple” the physicist Leo Szilard. He was so shocked by what he read that he felt the United States should develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. He feared that if Germany got the bomb before the U.S., there would be a nuclear apocalypse. The nuclear bomb to which Szilard contributed was dropped on Hiroshima, arguably causing the Japanese to surrender. This action, though resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of people, possibly saved Flanagan’s father’s life, as prisoners of war would have likely been killed in the event of an American invasion. Flanagan’s father’s survival led to Flanagan’s birth and ultimately the book Question 7 itself. Flanagan sums up this “chain reaction” by noting “a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me” (237).
Flanagan applies a similar lens to British colonialism in Tasmania. He describes two key facets of British colonialism—its establishment of a penal colony on the island and the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanian people. Flanagan describes how his maternal great-grandfather Edward Green was captured in Ireland and sent to Tasmania by the British. He worked as a “slave” laborer in the convict system, a status parallel to that of Flanagan’s own father in Japan. These historical facts likewise led to Flanagan’s life and work. He writes of this historical background, “I was the issue of a genocide and a slave society” (162). Question 7 is an interrogation of Flanagan’s relationship to and understanding of these historical connections across space and time.
Memory, Understanding, and Forgiveness
In Question 7, Flanagan explores the complex interactions between memory, understanding, and forgiveness by weaving together his personal memories, the memories of others, historical narrative, and reflections on the erasure of historical atrocities. Flanagan recounts his memories of his childhood while acknowledging that they are incomplete, fragmented, and perhaps not strictly true. He uses these incomplete memories to understand his parents and himself. He reflects on how memory and understanding can both help and impede the act of forgiveness, particularly as regards historical atrocities.
Flanagan remains forthright about the fallibility of his memories throughout the text. In Part 6, Chapter 7, Flanagan writes, “one of my strongest and most enduring memories of that time [when I was a child] is of something that might never have happened” (154). He goes on to describe a trip he made to a small mining town with his mother where he saw a woman who stared at him. However, he notes, “I am no longer sure if these are true memories or tricks of my mind […] my memories crumble into questions now” (155). However, he resolves that it is less important to determine the factual basis for these memories than to reflect on the emotional resonance the memories have, as when he describes a childhood memory of riding a horse bareback, noting, “it was a time of wonder and all things had the shape of miracles. And like a miracle, no evidence that it ever happened remained” (106). On the basis of these incomplete memories, Flanagan works to understand his family as complex human beings.
Flanagan also uses memory as a framework to understand historical narratives. For example, while Tasmanian people honor their “convict” heritage, “there was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting [about the Tasmanian Aboriginal genocide]” (103). Because people actively work to “forget” these events, the possibility of historical reckoning is nullified. Similarly, Flanagan finds his interviews with those who worked at the Japanese POW camp where his father was held ultimately unsatisfying. The workers claim not to remember what they did or otherwise seek to justify the atrocity. At the local museum, there is no institutional knowledge of the “slave labour” used in the coal mine during WWII. Nevertheless, Flanagan is forced into a situation where he feels he’s expected to convey forgiveness to a former camp guard, Mr. Soto, on his father’s behalf. Flanagan resents this expectation, feeling that such a gesture would be “a lie” and that “it [isn’t] for [him] to forgive” (6). He throws away another guard’s cash gift that serves as a kind of penance. Flanagan recognizes that simply remembering historical tragedies and asking for forgiveness for them is not sufficient. Because the injuries are not addressed and simply covered up, sometimes time does not heal but rather deepens the scars.
The Nature of Writing
Flanagan takes a nuanced view of The Nature of Writing. He reflects on his development as a writer, his ability to present the truth through writing, and the use of language as a tool of expression. He also describes how despite an author’s message or goals, their works can have unintended consequences, both positive and negative.
Flanagan critically appraises his history as a writer. His description of his first books, written for his sister when he was four years old, is his most positive assessment. He frames this first experience of writing to his sister as the moment he realized the power of writing to express messages of “love” and the importance of the “soul” of a book. Flanagan is more critical of his first novel, Death of a River Guide, and the book he wrote about his father’s experiences, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In both instances, he felt he did not achieve a true understanding of his subject. As he matures as a writer, Flanagan endorses Chekhov’s view of “the role of literature [which] was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions” (23). The text itself is Flanagan’s attempts to reprise these topics in a way that better reflects this perspective.
Flanagan demonstrates how books like H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free impact world history in ways the author doesn’t necessarily intend. Wells wrote The World Set Free to present the possibility of the radical potential of radium to create endless energy while warning about its destructive power. However, “one aspect [of the story] gripped a few imaginations”—the atomic bomb (93). Eventually, the bomb itself was built and, as Flanagan notes, its explosions eerily echoed what Wells had described in his book. As a result of the bomb’s development, the world moved further away from Wells’s idealistic vision of scientists toward a view of scientists as “hopelessly corrupted” (194). Flanagan nuances this somewhat cynical view of writing with a discussion of a short story by Leo Szilard called “My Trial as a War Criminal.” Szilard wrote this piece as an act of contrition, but it served as an unintended inspiration to Andrei Sakharov, a leading scientist in the Soviet nuclear weapon program to speak out against the program for “threaten[ing] the future of humanity” (199). Through these dueling examples, Flanagan shows that while writing can have negative consequences, it can also inspire positive action, reaffirming the interconnectedness of events across space and time.
