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Explain revenge as a theme in literature
Explain revenge as a theme in literature
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Perhaps Guitar Bains’ defining characteristic is his firm sense of justice. From the beginning of the novel he demonstrates his devotion to morality. Guitar speaks to Milkman about a fight between Milkman and his father, he expresses the feelings of guilt he had after killing a doe: “When I got up to it…I saw it was a doe. Not a young one; she was old, but she was still a doe. I felt… bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man” (Song of Solomon, 85). Guitar feels that it is wrong for the strong to fight the weak, whether be it Macon Dead striking Milkman’s mother or Guitar shooting a doe. Milkman’s sense of justice and his distain of the Caucasian race find their roots in his father’s death. After Guitar’s father is cut in half in a workplace sawmill accident, the white sawmill owner gives his mother $40 dollars and the children candy as compensation. This demonstration of the low value many whites placed on African-Americans plants a seed of hatred in Guitar. He can’t even eat sweets without becoming sick with the thought of his father’s death, as he explains to Milkman: “Since my father got sliced up in a sawmill and his boss came by and gave us kids some candy” (Song of Solomon, 61). Although his sense of justice never truly decays, as the novel progresses it is twisted and poisoned by his hatred for white people and begins to manifest itself in a far more sinister way: Milkman belongs to an organization named The Seven Days, which kills white men and women in retaliation for the often unpunished killing of blacks. “I suppose you know that white people kill black people from time to time…I had to do something. And the only thing left to do is balance it; keep things on an even keel…There is a society.... ... middle of paper ... ...rotect residents from acts of police brutality,” at times resorting to violence in order to achieve their goal (Brittanica). Additionally, Morrison clearly models Guitar after Malcom X. Not only do they share similar ideals, but even share the same birth year and state of origin. Earlier in life, Malcom X did not support integration of black and white society, rather supporting the idea of black supremacy and separation. Guitar’s belief that white people are unnatural and evil parallels Malcom X’s early stances. Guitar and The Seven Days are Morrison’s reminder that violence and revenge are never appropriate responses. Guitar begins as a likeable and essentially good character, but falls from morality and allows hate to consume him. Though the reader can sympathize with Guitar and understand the source of his hate, it is clear that what he is doing is wrong.
As I gazed across the book isles and leaned over carefully to pick one up out of the old dusty vaults of the library, a familiar object caught my eye in the poetry section. A picture in time stood still on this book, of two African American men both holding guitars. I immediately was attracted to this book of poems. For the Confederate Dead, by Kevin Young, is what it read on the front in cursive lettering. I turned to the back of the book and “Jazz“, and “blues” popped out of the paper back book and into my brain. Sometimes you can judge a book by it’s cover, I thought. Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead is a book of poems influenced by blues and jazz in the deep rural parts of the south.
A theme evident in the play Seven Guitars was the African-American man’s struggle for dignity and self-awareness against society and its malevolence. The rooster representing the average African-American man and Canewell and Hedley’s encounters with the rooster in the play depict this. Canewell talks about how roosters down south are different from the roosters up north. He says that the roosters did not crow during times of slavery. Crowing symbolizes waking up, with no crowing no one ...
Freedom is heavily sought after and symbolized by flight with prominent themes of materialism, classism, and racism throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. The characters Milkman and Macon Dead represent these themes as Macon raises Milkman based on his own belief that ownership of people and wealth will give an individual freedom. Milkman grows up taking this idea as a way to personally obtain freedom while also coming to difficult terms with the racism and privilege that comes with these ideas and how they affect family and African Americans, and a way to use it as a search for an individual 's true self. Through the novel, Morrison shows that both set themselves in a state of mental imprisonment to these materials
When first reading “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, it may initially seem that the relationship between musicians and drugs is synonymous. Public opinion suggests that musicians and drugs go hand and hand. The possibility lies that Sonny’s passion for jazz music is the underlying reason for his drug use, or even the world of jazz music itself brought drugs into Sonny’s life. The last statement is what the narrator believes to be true. However, by delving deeper and examining the theme of music in the story, it is nothing but beneficial for Sonny and the other figures involved. Sonny’s drug use and his music are completely free of one another. Sonny views his jazz playing as a ray of light to lead him away from the dim and dismal future that Harlem has to offer.
Several passages found throughout "Sonny's Blues" indicate that as a whole, the neighborhood of Harlem is in the turmoil of a battle between good and evil. The narrator describes Sonny's close encounters with the evil manifested in drugs and crime, as well as his assertive attempts at distancing himself from the darker side. The streets and communities of Harlem are described as being a harsh environment which claims the lives of many who have struggled against the constant enticement of emotional escape through drugs, and financial escape through crime. Sonny's parents, just like the others in Harlem, have attempted to distance their children from the dark sides of their community, but inevitably, they are all aware that one day each child will face a decisionb for the first time. Each child will eventually join the ranks of all the other members of society fighting a war against evil at the personal level so cleanly brought to life by James Baldwin. Amongst all the chaos, the reader is introduced to Sonny's special secret weapon against the pressures of life: Jazz. Baldwin presents jazz as being a two-edged sword capable of expressing emotions like no other method, but also a presenting grave danger to each individual who bears it. Throughout the the story, the reader follows Sonny's past and present skirmishes with evil, his triumphs, and his defeats. By using metaphorical factors such as drugs and jazz in a war-symbolizing setting, Baldwin has put the focus of good and evil to work at the heart of "Sonny's Blues."
Summary: This story is about racism in the south and how it affects the people it concerns. It starts out with Jefferson being sentenced to death for a crime that he did not commit. He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and because he was black, they assumed he did it. Grant Wiggins is told to go up to the jail and convince Jefferson that he is a man. At first he doesn’t know how to make Jefferson see that he is a man, but through visiting Jefferson, talking to Vivian and witnessing things around the community, he is able to reach Jefferson, convince him that he was a man.
Upon the ethos he has built, he appeals to logo by sharing more facts from worldwide history about the white people. X sets off with the fact that although the available history is excessively “whitened” (para. 19), genetically, the origin of humankind is still believed to be black. Under this condition, Malcolm X is “shocked” by the “total horror” of slavery, and “monstrous crime, the sin and blood” (para. 27) the white men has done. This use of pathos renders a view of a vulnerable black man who has suffered from the white’s injustice. He attaches this view with vivid yet miserable anecdotal imagery of black women “tied up and flogged with whips,” babies “being dragged off” (para. 28). His condemning diction creates a haughty and haunting attitude of convicts: “the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men,” (para. 28) are “like devils, pillaging and raping and bleeding and draining” (para. 29) colored people in the world. These facts lead to his perception of contradictions: these “religious” (para. 31) but “cannibalistic” (para. 33) people, who have taken advantage of “Chinese-invented gunpowder” to “[declare] war upon [Chinese] who objects to be narcotized” (para. 34) and later treat Chinese as dogs (para. 37). These facts emotionally and logically prove X’s anger and inhumane white people in the
In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison tells a story of one black man's journey toward an understanding of his own identity and his African American roots. This black man, Macon "Milkman" Dead III, transforms throughout the novel from a naïve, egocentric, young man to a self-assured adult with an understanding of the importance of morals and family values. Milkman is born into the burdens of the materialistic values of his father and the weight of a racist society. Over the course of his journey into his family's past he discovers his family's values and ancestry, rids himself of the weight of his father's expectations and society's limitations, and literally learns to fly.
Throughout each stage of his existence there are a multitude of symbols that are made evident. Haley shows how status played a major role in developing Malcolm’s self-worth. The author explains how a “conk” hairstyle tied him to the white world and showed him his own internalized racism. The writer also demonstrates how eyeglasses, a watch, and suitcases played a major role in his final transformation to the great leader that he made himself into. All of these symbols work together through the captivating tale of his life, and illustrates the many things that helped to shape him as a man. All things considered, Haley reveals just how critical symbols are in not only Malcolm X’s lives, but in everyone’s lives. Ultimately challenging his readers to look at their own lives in an attempt to discover what their personal symbols are. Malcolm X’s life had many challenges and setbacks, nevertheless, he discovered who he wanted to be and rose to the challenge, proving himself an important and influential
Till was an African American schoolboy in Chicago, and he went to visit his uncle in Mississippi. He reportedly “wolf whistled” at a white grocery store attendant, Mrs. Bryant, and was kidnapped by her husband and her husband’s half brother that following night. The boy’s body, terribly battered, with a bullet hole in the head and a cotton-gin fan affixed to the n...
The novel A Lesson Before Dying is about a young, college-educated man and a convict, Grant Wiggins and Jefferson. Grant is asked to make a man out of Jefferson who is convicted of killing a white man during a robbery in which he got dragged along to. Grant is asked by Emma Lou to make a man out of Jefferson, so if anything, Jefferson can die with dignity. Something that he was striped of when he was tried and his attorney used the defence that he is a hog. While trying to get through to Jefferson, Grant struggles because he is so far and separated from his own community. He holds resentment toward the white man and wants to get away from his town which he thinks is an on-going vicious cycle of misery. The novel A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines depicts the social and racial injustices faced by African Americans in the South in the late 40...
“Sonny’s Blues” revolves around the narrator as he learns who his drug-hooked, piano-playing baby brother, Sonny, really is. The author, James Baldwin, paints views on racism, misery and art and suffering in this story. His written canvas portrays a dark and continual scene pertaining to each topic. As the story unfolds, similarities in each generation can be observed. The two African American brothers share a life similar to that of their father and his brother. The father’s brother had a thirst for music, and they both travelled the treacherous road of night clubs, drinking and partying before his brother was hit and killed by a car full of white boys. Plagued, the father carried this pain of the loss of his brother and bitterness towards the whites to his grave. “Till the day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother.”(346) Watching the same problems transcend onto the narrator’s baby brother, Sonny, the reader feels his despair when he tries to relate the same scenarios his father had, to his brother. “All that hatred down there”, he said “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.”(355) He’s trying to relate to his brother that even though some try to cover their misery with doing what others deem as “right,” others just cover it with a different mask. “But nobody just takes it.” Sonny cried, “That’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”(355) The narrator had dealt with his own miseries of knowing his father’s plight, his Brother Sonny’s imprisonment and the loss of his own child. Sonny tried to give an understanding of what music was for him throughout thei...
A character named Jefferson, an African American male, is wrongly accused when he is in the wrong place at the time during a shoot-out between two African American men and a storeowner. During the shoot-out the storeowner and both men were shot and killed, Jefferson in shock stays at the scene of the crime until authorities arrived and arrested and tried Jefferson for murder. Jefferson being found guilty and compared to a hog fills him with hate and anger. Jefferson has an aunt that reaches out to a creditable teacher at a local school named Grant; she gets Grant to help Jefferson find a purpose. Grant helps Jefferson find a sense of dignity, although it took some time he was successful. Grant later focuses his time and energy on the importance of Jefferson’s death and tries to explain it to him. Jefferson doesn’t really understand it until members of the community come to visit him; young children, old men, strangers, friends, all come to see Jefferson in his cell and speak to him. The onslaught of attention makes Jefferson begin to understand the enormity of his task. He now realizes that he has become much more than an ordinary man and that his death will represent much more than an ordinary death. Gaines emphasizes the worth and dignity of everyday heroes like Jefferson; just as Christ did during his
In 1996, famed rapper and entertainer Tupac Shakur[1] was gunned down in Las Vegas. Journalistic sentiment at the time suggested he deserved the brutal death. The New York Times headline, "Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies," suggested Shakur, who was twenty five when he died, deserved his untimely death. - (Pareles, 1996) A product of a fatherless home, raised poor in the ghettos of San Francisco, Shakur, notes Ernest Harding of the L.A. Weekly, "lived in a society that still didn't view him a[s] human, that projected his worst fears onto him; [so] he had to decide whether to battle that or embrace it." (Hardy, 1996) As these fears forced Shakur into a corner, Shakur, in the music magazine Vibe, alludes to his own interior battle noting "there's two nigga's inside me," adding "one wants to live in peace, and the other won't die unless he's free." (All Eyes on Him, 1996) While many of his lyrics sensationalized gang violence and ghetto politics, dramatizing the murder of fellow African Americans and, especially, police officers, he also labored over trying to come to grips with African American self-realization, breaking free from imposed societal chains. Unfortunately, as Barry Glassner muses in his book The Culture of Fear (1999), �it seems to me at once sad, inexcusable, and entirely symptomatic of the culture of fear that the only version of Tupac Shakur many Americans knew was a frightening and unidimensional caricature.� (127) In o...
Her mother was a church-going woman and sang in the choir. Her mother didn’t work; she just stayed home and took care of the family. By being black, her parents faced lots of racism living in the south (1). Both of her parents had moved from the south to escape the racism and to find better opportunities. Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully aware of racial divisions until her teens (2).