The point of view used in The Bluest Eye and “Going to Meet the Man” evokes different emotions from similar actions. Both stories depict characters that exert aggressive sexual behavior to dominate. In “Going to Meet the Man,” the point of view elicits no compassion for Jesse, an aggressive oppressor. Conversely, the reader feels sympathy for Cholly in The Bluest Eye because the point of view portrays him as an unfortunate soul unable to control his heinous sexual aggressions. Jesse attends a “picnic” with his family that celebrates the power wielded by the whites in the extreme punishment of a black man for a seemingly minor act. Jesse’s family emerges from a tunnel of trees to join other white families at a hilltop clearing. Within the crowd, “there was a fire. [Jesse] could not see the flames, but he smelled the smoke,” Jesse’s father places him on his shoulders to provide a better view (1759). Jesse’s father made a conscientious effort to indoctrinate his son into the white man’s mindset as he experiences the white man’s perspective of the black man’s lynching. Jesse realizes that the white people “wanted to make death wait: and it was they who held death, now, on a leash which they lengthened little by little” (1760) as he observes the black man’s struggle to stay alive. The torture arouses Jesse, he “felt his scrotum tighten; and huge, huge, much bigger than his father’s flaccid, hairless, the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest” (1760). The description of the castration is erotic, “the white hand stretched them, cradled them, caressed them,” foreshadowing the nature of his future sexual tendencies (1760). The black man is larger and darker than anything Jesse has seen before, in direct con... ... middle of paper ... ... impulsivity leads him to tenderly attack his daughter, Pecola. The contemptuous act of rape is not born out of hatred nor is it racially driven. Cholly’s actions are born out of his own sense of worthlessness. “The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her,” reflects his moral ambivalence (163). Cholly’s remorse accentuates the point of view that in spite of his feebleness, he has some sense of what is right. The reader feels sympathy for Cholly because, in many ways, he is the victim. The point of view in The Bluest Eye portrays Cholly like the blacks oppressed by Jesse in “Going to Meet the Man.” Jesse and Cholly are two violent men who engage in aggression to derive sexual satisfaction. The point of view in which each story portrays these characters strongly influences the reader’s impression of their moral fiber.
‘Fire in a Canebrake’ is important since it sheds new light on the last mass lynching in America. It certainly shows the ambivalence and poor standards of the investigation into the case by the authorities as well as the terrible racism of the common townsfolk who could not care a jot about the fate of the murdered blacks. The book is a clear indictment of the terrible plague of lynching.
In Douglass’ book, he narrates his earliest accounts of being a slave. At a young age, he acknowledges that it was a masters’ prerequisite to “keep their slaves thus ignorant”, reporting he had no true account of his age, and was groomed to believe, “a want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood” (25). This mindset was inbreeded in slaves to use ignorance as control and power. As a child, Douglass is separated from his mother. Thus, he comprehends this is implemented in slavery to disengage any mental, physical, and emotional bond within families and to benefit slave owners concern of uprooting slaves for trade. He illustrates the “norm” action and response of a slave to the master. To describe the typical dialogue, he states, “To all these complaints, no matter how unjust, the slave must answer never a word”, and in response “a slave must stand, listen, and tremble” (38). In the course of his narrative, he describes several excruciating acts of abuse on slaves. His first memory of this exploitation, the lashing of his Aunt Hester, he depicts as, “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery” (29). Also, he gives accounts of owners’ self-deception tactics, injustices, and in effect, shaping characteristics of prejudice, jealousy, and dishonesty of slaves towards slaves. Likewise, connecting to the reader, slave...
Douglass, Frederick. The Heroic Slave. In Violence In the Black Imagination. Ed, Ronald T. Takaki. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
At Aunt Jimmy’s funeral, Cholly is placed into a traumatic world of racism when two white hunters interrupt him having clumsy sexual intercourse with a young girl, Darlene. He immediately transfers his angry energy to Darlene because he realizes that hating two white men would not be the smartest thing to do in a segregated racist world. “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him…--that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of as and a question mark of smoke” (119). The white men are out of his reach, and Cholly grows to hate and kill white men. His masculinity was revoked when those two men forced him to continue having sex while they hilariously watched.
The narrator’s father is being freed from slavery after the civil war, leads a quiet life. On his deathbed, the narrator’s grandfather is bitter and feels as a traitor to the blacks’ common goal. He advises the narrator’s father to undermine the white people and “agree’em to death and destruction (Ellison 21)” The old man deemed meekness to be treachery. The narrator’s father brings into the book element of emotional and moral ambiguity. Despite the old man’s warnings, the narrator believes that genuine obedience can win him respect and praise.
In the midst of all the commotion, Jesse is unable to sleep the night before the lynching. Within another flashback to that night, Jesse feels a strong need to have his ...
“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...
The universal struggle that everyone in today’s society goes through is invisible due to the fact that many individuals do not understand first hand how it is to live every day in the harsh matter that comes with dealing with the struggle. Moreover, many individuals similar to the position of Sonny in Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin feel as their inner struggle to escape the compelling, scary, and brutal, harsh reality around them is unbearable, and sometimes even tough to think about leaving for a better life. Additionally. Mr. Baldwin was a born in New York City and grew up as a preaching youngster in the rough and brutal environment that he was growing up in, but his environments gave him the inspiration and opened his eyes to see
This image is the author’s perspective on the treatment of “his people” in not only his hometown of Harlem, but also in his own homeland, the country in which he lives. The author’s dream of racial equality is portrayed as a “raisin in the sun,” which “stinks like rotten meat” (Hughes 506). Because Hughes presents such a blatantly honest and dark point of view such as this, it is apparent that the author’s goal is to ensure that the reader is compelled to face the issues and tragedies that are occurring in their country, compelled enough to take action. This method may have been quite effective in exposing the plight of African-Americans to Caucasians. It can be easily seen that Hughes chooses a non-violent and, almost passive method of evoking a change. While Hughes appears to be much less than proud of his homeland, it is apparent that he hopes for a future when he may feel equal to his fellow citizens, which is the basis of the “dream” that has been
Struggle, drugs, separation and reunion, that is what James Baldwin illustrates in Sonny’s blues. It is the story between two entirely different brothers as they struggle to discover who each one of them really is. “Sonny’s Blues” is narrated through the nameless older brother through first person with limited omniscience. Point of view is the narrator’s position in relation to the story which is depicted by the attitude toward the characters and Baldwin purposely picks to tell the story in the first person point of view because of the omniscient and realistic effects it contribute to the story overall. The point of view in this
Throughout Toni Morrison’s controversial debut The Bluest Eye, several characters are entangled with the extremes of human cruelty and desire. A once innocent Pecola arguably receives the most appalling treatment, as not only is she exposed to unrelenting racism and severe domestic abuse, she is also raped and impregnated by her own father, Cholly. By all accounts, Cholly should be detestable and unworthy of any kind of sympathy. However, over the course of the novel, as Cholly’s character and life are slowly brought into the light and out of the self-hatred veil, the reader comes to partially understand why Cholly did what he did and what really drives him. By painting this severely flawed yet completely human picture of Cholly, Morrison draws comparison with how Pecola was treated by both of her undesirable parents. According to literary educator Allen Alexander, even though Cholly was cripplingly flawed and often despicable, he was a more “genuine” person to Pecola than Pauline was (301). Alexander went on to claim that while Cholly raped Pecola physically, Pauline and Soaphead Church both raped her mental wellbeing (301). Alexander is saying that the awful way Pecola was treated in a routine matter had an effect just as great if not greater than Cholly’s terrible assault. The abuse that Pecola lived through was the trigger that shattered her mind. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the characters of Cholly Breedlove and Frieda McTeer to juxtapose sexual violence and mental maltreatment in order to highlight the terrible effects of mental abuse.
Jesses was an evil man, full of loathing and disgust against the blacks, but Jesses had not always felt that aversion for black. He used to have a black friend, Otis. When he commented the strange disappear of Otis, his father replied, “No, I reckon Otis’s folks was afraid to let him show himself this morning” (Baldwin, p. 1756) Jesses replied that Otis is too small to do something. When kids grow up, they learn the meaning of good and bad actions. As the father stat...
Browning can no more understand what it is like to be black than I can. She could freely shed the persona of a black woman the moment she finished writing “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” whereas a slave could not shed the oppression they faced and the stigma surrounding dark skin, which she compares to “prison bars” (39). However, Browning’s whiteness is exactly what empowers her work as an outspoken and publicly active abolitionist. By using a first-person narrative, Browning is forcing the reader to understand the number and intensities of the atrocities that slaves were facing, such as the hard labor, beating, and rape that the speaker faces, as well as the possible murder of both the speaker and her lover, although the speaker is ambitious about whether or not she and her lover actually
With The Bluest Eye, Morrison has not only created a story, but also a series of painfully accurate impressions. As Dee puts it "to read the book...is to ache for remedy" (20). But Morrison raises painful issues while at the same time managing to reveal the hope and encouragement beneath the surface.
Both of these black female characters suffer from some degree of displacement, not only being poor and black in a white-dominated society, but more importantly, the displacement bu their own culture and its images of whiteness. The Bluest Eye is a cathartic novel in terms of how it adresses the opposing ideals of white culture and how these ideals are internalized by thise who are marginalized and