Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey Into The Whirlwind

Memoir, often distinguished from autobiography, is a narrative that reveals experiences within the author's lifetime and is often written in the first point of view. An excellent example of this would be Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind. In her memoir, Eugenia Ginzburg describes her own imprisonment and exile by detailing her eighteen years in prison following her arrest during the Great Purge. Ginzburg begins her memoir with a series of questions and answers as if she is providing the reader a transcript of the meeting and provoking a feeling of outrage. One notable quote to represent this would be when a speaker says, “Don’t you know he’s been arrested? Can you imagine anyone’s being arrested unless there’s something definite against him” (Ginzburg 9-10)? Ginzburg’s method of quoting this speaker’s response is an effective rhetorical device of letting the facts speak for themselves. By means of that, this quote represents the atmosphere at the time in which anyone accused was considered guilty
Throughout the memoir, Ginzburg uses food to emphasize her points. One example would be when she refuses the food her interrogators offer her – “Was I hungry? Sickened by the prison mess tins and the stinking fish, I had eaten almost nothing all that week except a chunk of black bread washed down with hot water. Thanks, I am not hungry” (Ginzburg 67). This signifies to her captors that the loss of her freedom does not mean she has lost self-control. Thus making another aspect of this memoir be the prison itself. The prison suggests an inability to move freely and the tedious repetition of daily activities. This can be seen when Ginzburg is confined to her house in Kazan after being placed under suspicion of arrest. Prisoners must constantly wait in their prison cell until it is time to move to either another cell, to trial, or to await an even worse