In this novel, The Piano Lesson, we learn that some characters are doing their best to leave their mark on the world. A main character, Boy Willie, continually attempts to do so. For instance, he says, “I got to mark my passing on the road. Just like you write on a tree, ‘Boy Willie was here.’” By this, he means that he wants to make sure the world knows that he was here, and that he left something behind. Just as his grandfather carved beautiful, intricate designs into the piano and left it for his family, Boy Willie wants to do something similar. For example, he wants to buy Sutter’s land and make it nice for generations to come. Ironically, Boy Willie wants to sell his grandfather’s statement in order to make his own. Accordingly, this …show more content…
According to the text, “Boy Willie is thirty years old. He has an infectious grin and a boyishness that is apt for his name. He is brash and impulsive, talkative and somewhat crude in speech and manner”. This was shown when he argues with his sister, Berniece, constantly. She had a great deal of sentimental value within that piano, but Boy Willie was very tenacious about selling it despite his sister’s wishes. He got himself into a quite a situation, and it isn’t until the very end that it was resolved. Sutter’s ghost begins to start attacking Boy Willie after he tries to take the piano out of the house. The ghost doesn’t subside until Berniece plays the piano and calls the spirits of their family to rid of Sutter’s ghost. After all, this symbolizes the true value of the piano and their ancestry. Surprisingly, this novel ends with Boy Willie and Lymon going back to Mississippi without selling the piano. Finally, Boy Willie closes by telling Berniece that if she doesn’t keep playing on the piano, he and Sutter would both be back. In saying this, Boy Willie means that if they don’t keep their inheritance close to their heart, unfavorable events could begin happening once
In books, the reader can usually relate to the characters with traits or preferences. While reading Schooled, a character I can make a strong connection to Darryl. Darryl makes lots of mistakes on accident the he didn’t mean to do. For example, when Zach and Hugh set Cap up to be hit by the football team, Darryl had been the one that hit him first. He and Cap were friends and he would never mean to hurt Cap in that way. After Darryl hit Cap, he felt lots of remorse that he had hurt a friend. I will do stuff like put a glass on a wood table and it gets stained. I didn’t even think about it but it still got me in trouble. Another way I am related to Darryl is that we both stick up for what is right. Cap is treated terribly by Zach but Darryl
In Wilson’s play, Boy Willie’s struggle to achieve his father’s legacy and overcome white oppression reveals how people tend to strive for better than what their family members in the past had and develop similar mentalities as them. Boy Willie’s family piano, engraved with illustrations of his family history, has great sentimental value and his sister, Berniece, believes it is more important and crucial to honor their mother who lost their father after he stole it in an act of defiance against the Sutter family which ultimately led to Papa Boy Charles death. Her mother polished the piano for seventeen years after the death of their father, “seventeen years worth of cold nights and an empty bed”. For what?. For a piano - or a piano?
Berniece tries to show Boy Willie that the piano experienced more than pleasant events during those days. She interprets their Mama Ola’s pain by saying, “ ‘Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled...she rubbed and cleaned and polished and prayed over it...seventeen years’ worth of cold nights and an empty bed. For what? For a piano? For a piece of wood?’ ” (52). The tragedy of their Mama Ola is an almost mythic quality in their unified imagination, but the time has robbed it in Boy Willie’s face. He forces himself to think of his Mama Ola’s suffering as a metaphor than an actual event.
In the novel, All the King’s Men, Willie Stark puts his heart and soul into speaking the honest truth to the people during his campaign as governor. Unfortunately, the people do not know that he is involved in an affair with Anne Stanton. Similar to Willie, Cass Mastern, an ancestor of Jack Burden, commits adultery by sleeping with his best friend’s wife, Annabelle Trice. Cass Mastern’s story is parallel to that of Willie and Jack’s, which causes a burden on both their lives.
In the play “The Piano Lesson”, August Wilson utilizes two main characters Boy Willie and Berniece to present the theme of gender roles and sexual politics. The reaction of the siblings toward the piano illustrates the role of a man and woman during the conflict. Throughout the entire play they argue over the piano and struggle with an underlying problem of choosing to honor their ancestors or leaving the family’s history in the past. Boy Willie wants to show respect to his ancestors by selling the piano to continue the Charles’s family legacy. He wants to buy Sutter’s land because Sutter was a white slave master who forced his ancestors to work on the land. However, Berniece wants to keep the piano and doesn’t want to use it because of fear. The disagreement between the siblings shows the play’s representation of gender differences.
Huck Finn learns from the actions of people around him, what kind of a person he is going to be. He is both part of the society and an outlier of society, and as such he is given the opportunity to make his own decisions about what is right and what is wrong. There are two main groups of characters that help Huck on his journey to moral maturation. The first group consists of Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, and the judge. They portray society and strict adherence to rules laid out by authority. The second group consists of Pap, the King, and the Duke. They represent outliers of society who have chosen to alienate themselves from civilized life and follow no rules. While these characters all extremely important in Huck’s moral development, perhaps the most significant character is Jim, who is both a fatherly figure to Huck as well as his parallel as far as limited power and desire to escape. Even though by the end of the novel, Huck still does not want to be a part of society, he has made a many choices for himself concerning morality. Because Huck is allowed to live a civilized life with the Widow Douglas, he is not alienated like his father, who effectively hates civilization because he cannot be a part of it. He is not treated like a total outsider and does not feel ignorant or left behind. On the other hand, because he does not start out being a true member of the society, he is able to think for himself and dismiss the rules authority figures say are correct. By the end of the novel, Huck is no longer a slave to the rules of authority, nor is he an ignorant outsider who looks out only for himself. This shows Huck’s moral and psychological development, rendering the description of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a picaresq...
The Piano Lesson written by August Wilson is a work that struggles to suggest how best African Americans can handle their heritage and how they can best put their history to use. This problem is important to the development of theme throughout the work and is fueled by the two key players of the drama: Berniece and Boy Willie. These siblings, who begin with opposing views on what to do with a precious family heirloom, although both protagonists in the drama, serve akin to foils of one another. Their similarities and differences help the audience to understand each individual more fully and to comprehend the theme that one must find balance between deserting and preserving the past in order to pursue the future, that both too greatly honoring or too greatly guarding the past can ruin opportunities in the present and the future.
In the Piano Lesson the main symbol is the piano in Berniece’s home. The piano has a lot of meaning behind it and has been through a lot. This piano has made it all the way from the South to the North, which wasn’t easy. Berniece brought the piano miles from where it was because it meant so much to her. The carvings on this piano are magnificent they represent all of her ancestors. The blood and sweat that were put into making this piano means so much more than just something you play is amazing: “ Willie Boy carved all this. He got a picture of his mama… Mamma Esther… and his daddy, Boy Charles. He got all kinds of things that happened with our family” (1183). Instead of carving what Sutter asked he made the whole piano about the history of his family. After the carving was done, the piano became a monument to his family’s
August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, tells a story of a family haunted by the pain of their past and their struggle to find peace to move forward. The story begins with character Boy Willie coming up from the south visiting his sister Bernice. Boy Willie introduces the idea of selling the family’s heirloom, a piano, to raise enough money to buy the land on which his ancestors were enslaved. However, both Boy Willie and his sister Berniece own half a half of the piano and she refuses to let Boy Willie sell it. Through the use of symbolism, Wilson uses his characters, the piano and the family’s situation to provide his intended audience with the lesson of exorcising our past in order to move forward in our lives. Our past will always be a part of our lives, but it does not limit or determine where we can go, what we can do, or who we can become.
In the play “The Piano Lesson”, by August Wilson the character Doaker is a 47 year old man who lives in Pittsburgh with his niece, Berniece, and her daughter, Maretha. The main conflict in the first act of the play is whether or not they sell the piano. Berniece is against selling it and Boy Willie wants to sell it. Boy Willie does not understand why Berniece won’t sell the piano, but Doaker knows she never will. On pages 42-45, Doaker explains to Lymon why she would never sell the piano. He is explaining the story of how the piano came into their possession. He tells Lymon how it was originally Mr. Nolanders piano and he traded it for Doaker’s grandmother and father to Mr. Sutter, who wanted it as a gift for his wife. The wife soon missed Berniece and Boy Charles but Mr. Nolander wouldn’t trade them back.
In the play, it all begins when Boy Willie Charles and his friend Lymon arrive in Pittsburgh from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons. The two burst into the house of Boy Willie's uncle, Doaker, at five in the morning. The reader soon learns Boy Willie's plans and dreams. He's going to sell the watermelons—and the family's piano, the center of the story—from a man named Sutter who recently died. Sutter was a descendant of the family’s slave owner, and Boy Willie is determined to make the land his. Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, the other main protagonist, is persistent against selling the piano, because she believes it should remain hidden and away from wandering eyes.
In the play, The Piano Lesson, music played an important role. The piano in the play represented the African American history and culture. The ghost of Sutter represented the pain and trauma that had been endured throughout the generations in the Charles family. Berniece did not play the piano because she associated it with pain and the bad things that happened to her family members. She did not want to accept the things that had happened in her family’s past. She thought that she could deny everything and act like it never happened. She believed if she continued to run from everything and everybody that the pain would go away. Berniece was burdened and haunted by the ghost of Sutter until she gave in and played the piano after all of those years. After playing the piano, Berniece was no longer burdened or haunted by the past. She was free from all of the denial. She escaped the pain through the music and reflecting on the carvings on the piano, which represented her heritage. Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie, told her “Berniece, if you and Maretha don’t keep playing on that piano… ain’t no telling… me and Sutter both liable to be back” (Wilson 108). By saying that, he meant that if she did not allow her daughter to continue playing the piano and learning about her culture that she would end up going through the same things that Berniece had gone through. Music has a huge impact on the African American culture in several ways and many things about the past can be learned through it.
The piano represents itself as something different for everyone. For Berniece, it exists as an artifact to speak with her ancestors. For Boy Willie, it acts as a piece of property he can sell to get more money, no matter how much it means to the family. And to Doaker, it stands as just a piano that has a good and bad effect on the family, until the end where the ghost of Sutter leaves them for
Wilson demonstrates how one should accept and respect the past, move on with their life or slow down to pay respects to their family?s history, by describing the struggle over a symbolic object representing the past like the piano. Often people will sulk in the past and struggle with themselves and the people around them when they cannot come to terms with their personal history or a loss. Others will blatantly ignore their personal history and sell valuable lessons and pieces of it for a quick buck to advance their own lives. Berniece and Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson are great examples of these people. Through these contrasting characters and supernatural occurrences, Wilson tells the tale of overcoming and embracing a rough and unsettling family history.
New Boy is a short film that envelops the viewer into a third person character and leads viewers to experience how it feels to be an outsider “The New Boy”, the audience experiences this feeling through the Protagonist 's mind in this case “Joseph.” This short film not only focuses on the idea of bullying but also the idea of being an outsider.The positioning of the title “New Boy” on the left-hand side of the frame indicates that the new boy will be powerless.