Alias Grace

* History * Historiographic metafiction * Blurring the line between fact and fiction * The epigraph * Engaging in an act of construction * Grace's unreliability * Self-conscious construction * Unreliability * Historical context of Grace's narrative which suggests unreliability [ch10] * Offered a series of stories that are being put together - narrative construction over truth * [ch12] "Making up any old thing to suit themselves" - unreliability of the documents of history * Imposing a value that ignores the inaccuracies * A comment on history's unreliability through Grace's own * Drawing attention to the fallibility of social history * Truth of presumed public and factual history by relying on subconscious narrative * History got it wrong - a direct commentary on the way we make history * Not as authoritative as we make it out to be * Narrative structure: Randomness * The content and the facts * Not thinking about the way it's put together * The process becomes the object of investigation * Content of history is flawed and unreliable * Process becomes the tension * Creation is consciously revealed to reader - structure is really important * Randomness via Grace and she is made to comment upon * [ch43] What she shall tell Simon * Wondering what she's going to tell him, likening it to putting together a quilt * Not seen as a clear and sequential narrative but a jumbled mess of a rag bag * Patching it together into something that formulates a clear structure * Not a clean straight line * Choosing this and that - selection in the act of narration