James Baldwin “Notes of a Native Son” (pgs. 50-71)
Focus
●major quotations
●foreshadowing and other timing/chronological techniques in narrative essays
●parallel diction, parallel syntax, and parallel structure
While Reading
In your journal...
●identify striking and powerful quotations
○paraphrase each quotation and then comment on why each seemed important or meaningful.
●structure: analyse the major sections of the essay, explaining their main ideas, strategies, and overall purpose for the essay as a whole
●identify instances of parallelism (diction, syntax, and structure)
●identify moments of time changes/movements and how they are constructed
Questions over Rhetoric and Style
- How does each event alone foreshadow key elements of the rest of the essay?
- What are the time periods of the essay? Baldwin does not present them chronologically; how does he connect them?
- What is Baldwin’s attitude toward his father? Is this attitude static or evolving?
- What is the purpose of paragraph 6?
- Identify at least three stories that Baldwin tells about himself. What does each demonstrate? What is the unity among them?
- What are the different settings in the essay? How does Baldin knit them together?
- In most of the essay, Baldwin describes events that have happened, but in several cases, he reenacts the event with dialogue. Identify these instances and consider why he chose to “show” the event or situation through dialogue?
- Baldwin uses many different writing techniques in the essay. Find instances of concrete description of a person or place, action, reflection, and strong argumentative assertions. How do these techniques further his specific purposes?
- Why does Baldwin divide the essay into three sections? What is the purpose of each?
- Find several examples of parallel diction, parallel syntax, and parallel structure on a larger level (such as paragraph structure). What effect does Baldwin achieve by using this technique?
- Analyze how Baldwin’s description of the sermon at his father’s funeral is written in the style of a sermon (paragraph 33).
- How does Baldin make the parallel stories about his father’s life and death and about racism in the US intersect? Find specific passages and analyze them carefully.
- How do you interpret the title? (You might do some research into the relationship between Baldwin and Richard Wright, who wrote the novel Native Son, published 15 years earlier in 1940. Is Baldwin suggesting a dialogue with Wright? Is he “writing back to an established author?)
Major Quotations:
●P3: “It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.”
●P15: “There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood--one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it.”
●P22: “I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do, but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”
●P27: “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
●P29: “Between pity and guilt and fear I began to feel that there was another me trapped in my skull like a jack-in-the-box who might escape my control at any moment and fill the air with screaming.”
Structure Notes:
●strong introduction serving as the anchor for the essay “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.”
●Beautiful transition: P5 to P6 (...overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.) P5 about father’s bitterness, where P6 about Baldwin becoming bitter.