Haylee: Sequence 7 Assn. 1:Answers

Our Secret by Susan Griffin





In this essay, Susan Griffin takes a look at a person that most people would label immediately as evil. In her research of Heinrich Himmler, she searches for answers to the question as to how he developed into the kind of person who could commit atrocities. She looks at what influenced him, and how in turn, he influenced the lives of others. She reflects on her own life, and how it has been influenced by these events, and other people who lived before and after them. She looks for similarities and common themes. Throughout her essay, she switches themes; whether it's cells, rockets, artists, her own family, or historical data about HH. She doesn't specifically state her reasoning for structuring her essay this way, and, as readers, we are forced to find the connection in these topics. However, she does supply statements that let us know what journey she is on, and what her purpose for writing is. But none of it seems blatantly pursuasive, other than in her own feelings about what her research has led her to believe.
Griffin asks us to look deeper at something ugly and uncomfortable. She asks us to think about influence; how it affected one person, and many people.

• "I have come to believe that every life bears in some way on every other." (p332)


• "...is one ever really free of the fate of others? I was born in 1943, in the midst of this war. And I sense now that my life is still bound up with the lives of those who lived and died in this time." (p. 314)


• "....hoping to find a door into the mind of this man, even as his character first forms so that I might learn how it is he becomes himself." (p. 315)


• "...she traces the origins of this violence to childhood. of course there cannot be one answer to such a monumental riddle, nor does any event in history have a single cause. Rather a field exists...Each life is influenced and it in turn becomes an influence...Childhood experience is just one element in the determining field." (317)


• "What then occurs if the soul in its small beginnings is forced to take on a secret life?...He harbors his secrets in fear and guilt, confessing them to no one until in time the voice of his father chastising him becomes his own." (319)
  
  

"To tell a story, or to hear a story told, is not a simple transmission of information. Something else in the telling is given too, so that, once hearing, what one has heard becomes a part of oneself." (p. 339)


Here, Susan Griffin tell us that she is not going to simply transmit information to us; that there is more to reading and writing than to simply state an idea or theory or story, and use arguments and facts to support this story or idea.

Griffin's style is experimental for a couple of reasons. Firstly, she does not just state a thesis or argument and then use facts to support it. She begins her essay with a short piece of information about cells. She then gives us a fragment of a memory from someone. Her next sentence is regarding missiles. This patterns continues for awhile, including introducing Heinrich Himmler; historical facts and personal wonderings; leaving the reader to ponder how all of these things are related. In this way, we as readers, are taken on the journey of finding answers with her. We are forced to find, through her varied themes, our own interpretation of how things influence one another. We are sort of forced into the process with her. There are times when she speaks in first person, and times when she writes in third person.

I feel that Griffin is very successful not only in using these different themes, that do seem interconnected, but using them in a way that forces the reader to engage in the search with her. The essay is not jumbled or unreadable; the themes, however different, have a pattern and flow that work toward a gathering of information, and they seem to symbolize a journey to tell a story that is complicated.