Lecture 23: Approaches to Researching Fiction
z The answers to these and other questions made the scene come
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o For example, one important discovery was that the headquarters
building of the Dutch West India Company was just off a street
near the docks called Haarlemmerstraat. The street was mostly
lined with taverns and brothels that catered to sailors.o $QRWKHULPSRUWDQW¿QGLQJZDVWKDWWKHPHPEHUVRI-DFRE¶V
religious sect did not believe in the idea of sin in the traditional
sense. Instead, they saw what others called sinful behavior as
ignorance of humanity’s oneness with God, who controlled
everything people did.z Here’s an excerpt from the scene that attempts to capture what
Jacob might have seen and heard on a night in Amsterdam in 1719
and how he might have reacted to it: After a meal of bread and cheese and beer in the smoky
kitchen of the inn, Jacob ascended to his hot, airless room up
under the eaves. The little window in his room was high—
he had to stand to see out of it—and he pushed it open and
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square below, punctuated by fans of lamplight falling out of
tavern doorways. He took off his shoes and his waistcoat and
tried to sleep on the swaybacked bed, but he only tossed and
turned in the breathless heat, kept awake by the nightly riot
below. Woven through the roar of the crowd were the whine
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Jacob remembered from childhood, rollicking dance tunes
accompanied by the clatter of boots against cobbles as sailors
and whores danced in the square. Sudden, violent squalls rose
above the general racket: the harsh voices of drunken men
braying the words of “The Cuckoo’s Nest.” The shattering
screams of women dissolving into cackling laughter. Bottles
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howl as a blade pierced him. More cackling laughter. And as
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