Trying to Reflect Reality

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Challenging the perception of a past event can be difficult as Craig Offman pointed out in his article, “A tempest around ‘Isaac’s Storm.” This centered around Eric Larson’s historical narrative, Isaac’s Storm, in which in a novel like fashion, Larson described the events surrounding the before and after of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. As his presentation challenged traditional view points of what happened through reasonable points made throughout the text, I thus believe Eric Larson did not use authorial intent in the depiction of Isaac Cline. The town of Galveston, in the aftermath of the hurricane, viewed Isaac Cline, “as the Paul Revere who warned residents to leave before the hurricane raged into town” (Offman). Yet Larson looked at the sources of the time and presented Isaac Cline as a human being. The author does this when he mentions Isaac’s claim in his journal that he saved over 6,000 people though records from the town’s library have no evidence of this (Larson 168). So though this was a historical novel where it is possible some facts can be twisted around in the name of entertainment, the book presented a real history. Larson does this by using personal writings, like journals, as they are great tools that give people a chance to recreate people or even disproof them when they make false claims, as he has done with Isaac.  As a future Ancient Historian (or basement dweller), I need to look at primary sources carefully as the writer’s intent (especially in Late Antiquity) can be bias and nonfactual in an attempt to make an argument. This goes for anyone making a history as jessicak best makes light of this as she stated, “Isaac’s heroic actions [were] much more complicated, and this book emphasizes that there are gray areas in history [that] we need to search for” (Advancement Through Disasters). Thus Eric Larson not only created this book to entertain but to inform people of reality as it is always present with us, whether we accept it or not.