Quarter 2 OR Week 5 Post B

Jacob's life at the circus has enveloped most of the book. We learn little about his life before the circus except that he was training to be a vet at Cornell University and that his parents died in a tragic accident. "'So, what's your story, anyway?' says Kinko. The sunlight flashes like knives through the slats behind him. I cover my eyes and grimace. 'No, I mean it. Where'd you come from?' 'Nowhere,' I say" (144). Jacob tries to erase his past and start a new life. It makes me wonder, when he talks about his wife as an old man, if she even knew his past. If he ever told his children about his life, or if anyone even knows. This avoidance reminds me of a movie we watched in Spanish class called La Historia Oficial. It's the story of a woman living during the time of The Dirty War in Argentina. During that time, the government is ruled through a military regime kind of like an oligarchy. They are in control of everything and anyone who upsets the government disappears. The woman, Alicia, has a daughter named Gaby who is adopted. No one knows where she comes from and who her mother was, or even if her mother was willing to give Gaby up or if Gaby was just taken away from her mother. Gaby and Jacob are similar in the way that their pasts are being erased, but Jacob is erasing his own past and Gaby's past has been erased for her. I don't understand why Jacob denies everything that's happened to him leading up to the circus, but maybe that's the way for a lot of people working with the Benzini Brother's Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Maybe it's a place people have gone to run away from their past and make a new life for them. Maybe being on the move has helped them from establishing roots anywhere or getting to attached to anything. After all, isn't that what Jacob has done? After the death of his parents, he ran away from everything he knew so he could start over. He didn't have cent to his name or anything else but his name. Maybe by keeping his past in denial, Jacob is able to avoid the pain that his parents' death has caused him, and being so young, maybe Jacob just doesn't know who to deal with the pain. The circus was his escape, and he took it.