I Know Why The Caged Bird Analysis

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In her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing, Maya Angelou counsels that "If growing up is painful for the [German] black [boy], being aware of [his] displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat" (6). Humanity's instinctive desire to a love, acceptance, and belonging is oft times hazy due to the subtle struggle between sincere yearning and pretentiousness. Kurt Vonnegut captures these facets of humanity's foibles through the loneliness of six year old Joe Louis, a German black boy in want of a father. In his short story, "D.P.," Vonnegut's melancholy realism depicts war's impact (displacement) on children; while the absence (rust) of traditional family structure and identity (razor) lurks in its ruins. Through a trilogy …show more content…

two by two," Vonnegut alludes that the displaced children are returning home–– "[parading]" to their Holy Land (161). After "[wandering] off the edges of the earth, searching for parents who had long ago stopped searching," "eighty-one small sparks of human life" with "bobbing, chattering, [and] cheerful" spirit, march through the struggle of absent parents and lack of self- knowledge. Vonnegut reveals that children uprooted from traditional family structure are prone to psychological or borderline emotional vulnerability. The role of Joe Louis's vulnerability stems from frequent ethnic and religious overtones, disrupting his self-esteem, causing him to question his own existence in society. For example, the village carpenter and mechanic often joke about Joe's nationality, calling him "Brown Bomber" and asking to "see [his] white teeth sparkle," not aware that their seemingly innocent banters actually makes Joe "uneasy" (162). Joe's upbringing in "an orphanage set up by Catholic nuns" also crucially shape his religious identity. Joe states that "God made [him]" when asked "where [he came] from," revealing that Christian values of a divine father is very much engrave in the psyches of children that they do not know the difference between location and divine origin. The mockery of his ethnic background and the burdens of religious affiliation lead Joe …show more content…

Joe's reality is as an orphan living in an "orphanage" in the "German village of Karlswarld" (161). However, as the only multiracial child in the orphanage, the other children ostracizes Joe. Thusly, like every human being, Joe yearns for acceptance and the feeling of belonging. As he illustrates his Papa is "high as [the] ceiling" and "wider than [the] door," the readers are aware of Joe's motive, impress through the means of exaggeration for acceptance (171). His description of his Papa is seemingly the innocent imagination of a six year old, but his creative mind abruptly takes a turn towards the machinery of war. He continues to describe his "papa [of having] a pistol as big as [the] bed" and having "a cannon as big as [the] house" and "hundreds and hundreds [of war soldiers] like him" (171). Joe's exaggeration of reality, that's vastly influence by the technologies of war, reveals that the minds and wellbeing of children are endanger of corruption. Vonnegut, essentially, counsels that children and war are incompatible. The technological incursions of war do not necessarily constitute or promise the betterment of the future; but rather desolates and destroys the true amelioration of the future, the children. Society's inane ideal of perpetual happiness and total freedom through warfare not only

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