Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Week 7: Notes of a Native Son
I did not enjoy this piece as much as some of the others we have read throughout the course, due to the fact that I believe that the story was lengthy when it may not have needed to be. However, I still think that Baldwin was able to strongly portray the idea of the racial hatred and the internal conflict of the protagonist quite effectively. In class, we discussed the bitter tone of the speaker, where it could have derived from. A possibility that was not discussed in class, that I believe was the cause of his bitterness, was the speaker's own reflection in itself. Throughout the piece, his thoughts and memories seem to have been spilling out as if they had been bottled up for a long time. When his father died, the speaker was forced to reflect on his father and then on himself. I believe that the speaker's bitterness came directly from the confrontation with his thoughts and feelings, because he had avoided them for a long time, and that many of these thoughts and memories were quite painful. His reflection came with bitterness because he had to face the reality of what awful events had occurred from racism as well as the sad realization that he wished he could have had a stronger relationship with his father before he passed.
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This is a really interesting idea about the cause of the speaker's bitterness. I think it is a definite possibility. Seemingly, as a child, Baldwin avoided his father at all costs and in doing so, avoided coming to terms with the emotions that were driving his actions of avoidance towards his father. When in New Jersey, he gained greater perspective about his father's own anger; however, he never really comes to terms with this new perspective until he is forced to at his father's funeral. His emotional catharsis at the funeral could then reflect Baldwin's own anger at himself for not understanding his father more. As he ends his story, "...I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now."
ReplyDeleteI'd agree about the story being excessively lengthy if it weren't for the last paragraph or two, where Baldwin discussed hate and injustice. I think it took all of those examples to reinforce the point that man is inherently injust and we must never accept this all the same. Up to the last paragraph though, I was getting a bit bored. So maybe Baldwin could have been a bit less lengthy in his descriptions, but they all mostly made up for it at the end.
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