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Analysis Of Stephen Kumalo's Cry, The Beloved Country

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In Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton details a gripping story of Stephen Kumalo’s search for his son while conveying significant ideas regarding the social injustice and integrated racism of South Africa during the segregation of apartheid. Paton structures his story around revolving points of view and maintaining a sometimes simplistic or lyrical language specific to varying parts of the novel to express his message of the disintegration of faith coming from new experiences, distinctively hardships, and the lack of effort placed into the overarching purpose of believing in religion, people, or humanity. Paton uses varying points of view throughout the entirety of the novel, employing the distinct voices to convey different perspectives …show more content…

Jumping from an all knowing narrator to specific points of views, Paton makes the narrator purposefully ignorant and limits its overall scope of situations, through both dialogue and context, while the novel has given enough information for it to be clear what is happening, which is shown, for example, through James Jarvis’s description of Kumalo as a stranger by detailing, “there was a knock on the door… [he found] a native parson standing on the paved stone.. The parson was old, and his black clothes were green with age, and his collar was brown with age or dirt (Paton 211).” Through this description of Kumalo, his broken spirit and overall bleak outlook on life and faith is highlighted. While Paton primarily uses an omniscient third person, his usage of occasional second person gives making the story more involved with using ‘you’ and directly conveying specific messages regarding natives crime, apartheid’s effect on society, or racism as a whole. Also, to add to the directness of his writing at points in the novel, Paton diverts from his usual past tense and uses present tense when speaking through second person. Utilizing different voices and structures, Paton creates a changing message that molds to fit with his specific purpose during varying points in his novel. Throughout Cry, The Beloved Country, Paton’s language remains primarily simple and plain in nature, only

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