Analysis Of The General Observation Is The Narrator Of Cane

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posed as: Will a character come to terms with himself and achieve wholeness as a person? How will a character find pride and acceptance in himself? Is there meaning, within this telling, for black people in either the North or the South?
An unnamed Narrator navigates the space between reality and fable, enabling engagement with the characters. For the purposes of this paper, the general observation is that Toomer is the Narrator of Cane. Using a tone of authority, he narrates and judges his characters and their situations, as he links racial groups and gender through an intimacy that he shares with the reader – even when he allows his own knowledge to be both limited and incomplete, perhaps as a caveat to his own racial views.
Employing…show more content…
Cane’s narrator often trivializes the women he speaks of, subjecting them to a privileged male gaze and specific objectivity, despite their connection to the struggle for black value and humanity. As a collage of related pieces, on their own, the characters of Cane struggle to own themselves, struggle against white society, and struggle against their blackness and their past, generating a constant pull for connection as a thematic struggle for self-unity.
Toomer depends on evocative symbolic representation to carry the messages of Cane, and this includes the movement, scent, and sounds of the titular sugar cane plant. The cane makes issue of the work, location, and economics attached to the plant’s value to the South, and to the black and white people who do the work of production. It also serves to embody the experience of the painful southern history of enslavement. Similarly, the Cotton Flower stands as a symbol of life, hope, and beauty coming from a cruel, waterless, and barren land. A plant with a hard and thorny exterior, it grows amid and in spite of Jim Crow, vestiges of chattel enslavement, and the powerless terrors of disenfranchisement.
Dusk is a powerful symbol in Cane and this time of day occurs in nearly every piece. It is a moment of mystery, secrets, threat, contention, and potential magic. Dusk also serves to remind the reader of how the “dusky”
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