The Use Of Tara Westover's Techniques In 'Educated'

Colin Roques Mid-Term Writing In the novel, Educated, Tara Westover uses asterisks at the bottom of pages to show how the situation is thought of in the time period of her writing the book. The asterisks she uses give the reader a clue that the event didn’t happen. The asterisks are either people telling a different story than Westover did, or they did not remember clearly enough to say what happened. This unreliability from Westover could affect the reader’s understanding of her point of view. Westover’s first asterisk is about when they did not own a phone in the house. Her mother decided to buy a phone line, but Westover is unsure when this happened. In the text Educated, it states “I have asked my brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins, but I have not been able to definitively establish a time-line, and have therefore relied on my own …show more content…

This leaves the reader to think if Westover had only a slight memory of what happened, why did she choose to include it? Another asterisk she uses is about the time Shawn fell off the forklift. In the text Educated, it states that “This is how the fall was described to me, but my mind sketches it differently on a white page with evenly spaced lines. He ascends, falls on a slope, strikes the rebar and returns to the ground. I perceive a tri-angle. The event makes sense when I think of it in these terms. Then the logic of the page yields to my father” (Westover 128). This shows that Westover takes what she hears from people and describes how she thinks about what happens. She does not fully know what happens, but describes her way to make it sound more appealing. Also, it states in the text, “Mother says Shawn was not standing on a pallet, only on forklift tines. Luke remembers the pallet, but substitutes a metal drain, with the grating removed, in place of the rebar. He says the fall was twelve feet, and that Shawn began acting strangely as soon as he regained