History By Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante novel, History: A Novel, follows the life of a half-Jewish school teacher named Ida Mancuso, along with her two sons Nino and Giuseppe. The novel is staged to show events that happened chronologically starting with World War II all the way to the year of 1947. As each character is revealed, the narrator shares a sense of what each character is like. Each of their personalities show how they depict life and ultimately history through time. Sarah Carey’s essay, Elsa Morante Envisioning History, gives a great insight as to how Elsa Morante shows how each of the main characters depicts history through photographs. The way someone views certain events can be viewed to them in a similar way as a previous event that had happened in their
All though Gunther is not mentioned much after the first chapter, he still remains an important character in the novel. He is the younger German soldier that is wandering the streets of Rome before he is to be shipped off to Africa to start his tour. One night in a drunken state of mind, he comes to find Ida who he follows back to her apartment and rapes her. From the brief description that is given of him, one can assume that he’s very young and no less to young to be apart of Hitler’s army. As Morante describes, “He had, as it happened, grown suddenly, unseasonably, all during the last summer and autumn; and so, in his body’s haste to reach maturity, his face, though lack of time, had remained the same as before” (Morante p.14). Though he is a young man getting ready to be deported, he is still stuck in his immature ways. His lack of maturity plays a maturity plays a part in how he depicts history. In Sarah Carey’s essay, she gives a prime example of how Gunther’s past plays a part in how he views certain situations. For example, as Carey states, he takes a photo of Ida’s son Nino. While the photo was a rather recent one, he assumed he was dead. Gunther compares this photo to a photo of his past. Carey states, “The fact that the soldier assumes that the boy depicted has joined the ‘cult of the dead’ also speaks to photography as a locus of remembrance”