Comparing Love in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and Another Country

1. In the opening paragraph, Baldwin establishes his ethos by connecting himself to his audience as a fellow citizen and fellow American, someone who loves his country and wants it to be whole and healthy. Though he identifies the chief fear of his audience as the fear of Communist, he proposes that the ore fearful aspect of American society of the early 1960s is the “bad faith and cruelty” of generations. Baldwin builds credibility with his audience by recognizing teachers as powerful people who “deal with the minds and hearts of young people.” His audience senses that he as a deep respect for what teachers do each day. He

Baldwin´s extensive use of pathos makes the reader feel emotionally connected to the people and events in the essay. He often times recounts stories from his childhood, which were filled with racism. A noteworthy story was that of Baldwin and the two police officers who gave him ¨gratuitous humiliation¨ (Baldwin, 32). When he was a young teen, Baldwin was pushed down and humiliated by two white police officers, who went as far as to make sexual inferences about him due to his race. Most readers would feel empathy towards him due to it happening at such a young age, which exposed how racist the world still was. He also says, ¨If the concept of God has any

In the text, Baldwin explains to his nephew how his grandfather was defeated in life because he believed he was what the white world called him and treated him as. Baldwin then recalls emotional memories of holding his little brother when he was a baby, wiping away his tears, and hearing his laughter, to show their love and attachment. Baldwin then proceeds to tell of the damage he saw discrimination and racism do over the years to his brother, saying, “But no one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs” (Baldwin 5). By saying this, and addressing the damage the saw the discriminatory treatment do to a loved one , Baldwin creates an image anyone could relate to, in hopes that African-Americans will begin to be treated as equals.

The plot in the story is mainly about personal expression. It attempts to illustrate the ability and freedom of personal expression in an environment and circumstances that degrade the entire pursuit to achieve personal freedom. The author is able to exploit English language, the language of black oppression and use these techniques to tell a true story of African-American experiences. Baldwin carefully controls the intensity of his story to harness acceptance across

Authors across time have used various relationship models in their works of writing in order to communicate their beliefs about love. By examining the relationship between two unlike brothers in his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin communicates his belief that the idea of love can save people. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her short story “Hell-Heaven” also shows that the idea of love can save people, but by the end the characters are only truly happy where there is acceptance. Both Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” and Lahiri short story “Hell- Heaven” while culturally different, use the trials and tribulations of their characters to prove that the idea of love is a saving force.

Growing up in Harlem, New York during the 1920’s and 30’s, James Baldwin was a young Black man desperate for a place of acceptance. Surrounded by drugs and prostitution Baldwin saw a change in his neighborhood and his friends as they got older. With his friends beginning to drink and smoke Baldwin knew times were changing. He became very aware of the body development of the girls and the boys; and to his surprise he was even more enticed by the changes in the boys (Baldwin 17). During this time, Baldwin and his friends would begin to experience the racism that White America had to offer. No longer shielded by their age or naivety they had to face the fact that they were not accepted because of their skin color. With this realization, Baldwin would begin his search to be part of something bigger then him. During a similar time period, Abraham Maslow, a Psychologist and Professor at numerous universities over his career, including Brandeis and Columbia, published a theory called “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” (Boeree). In this theory, Maslow describes the four most important needs for a human to be self actualized. The self actualized person is not one of perfection but one who is on a search to understand and discover why their life is the way it is, from why “their feet hurt” to if “they do not like eggplant”. They take responsibility for their actions and try to be honest people on their search to figuring out their purpose in life. Surrounded by hate and anger, Baldwin is

Throughout Baldwin’s essay, he encourages changes in education for blacks, but he does so using ethos and pathos. For example, he starts off by notifying teachers that they will meet the most determined resistance from society, as he has in his writings. This shows his credibility by informing the teachers that they do not struggle alone in this issue. The use of ethos leads him to the use of pathos by providing an example of an African American child growing up, drawing conclusions about the world, but not having an explanation for it. This really makes the audience contemplate about their childhoods.

On page 41 of The Fire Next time Baldwin states that “ we were, all (...)close to love. In today's society African Americans are still being

It takes him his whole life to grasp the fact that his father was connected to him in many ways. Baldwin’s closest connection to his father was the amount of rage both of them shared regarding many aspects of life.

Throughout the entire essay, Baldwin uses his circumstances to make you feel sympathy towards him as an author. In one part of his works he tells the awful account of his father’s mental illness. When telling the audience what he had went through, at the age of 19, someone reading this, might say that brings them sympathy, while his tone in passages where he explains these sad expressions are unattached. He writes, “…In the morning the telegram came saying he was dead. Then the house was full of relatives, friends, hysteria, and confusion…” Here, he plainly states the facts of how his house was after his father’s death but does not describe how he feels about the people being in his house or the emotional toll his father’s death has taken on him. This is just one aspect of

Instead of power and violence, Baldwin suggests love as an approach to solving the human oppression epidemic. For him, this solution would work better than other methods that he had talked about in his books such as the complete separation of Blacks and Whites as advocated by the Nation of Islam. The problem with using violence as retaliation against those who have been oppressive for Baldwin is that it leads to an endless cycle of vengeance which he describes as a

The second portion of the memoir is recounted through flashback, where Baldwin draws parallels between his father’s life and his own. At some points, Baldwin is conscious of the similarities he shares with his domineering father, such as “the vice of stubborn pride.” He also recognizes the unfortunate inheritance of his father’s “intolerable bitterness of spirit”. However, Baldwin has moments where his rage seems to blind him to the personal characteristics he and his father share. He establishes the extended metaphor of his father’s hatred as a “disease of the mind”. Partly because he never divulges his negative racial experiences to his son,

Baldwin grew up on the streets of Harlem; he began to realize the all of the temptations such as sex and drugs was all around him. In order not to give into these temptations, he went to the church in the hopes it would give him some insight on what to do. Eventually Baldwin sadly realized that the church was not preaching the idea of love to everyone, but only to the ones who believed in the same things they did. "It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being ...must

The assigned literary work this week was written by James Baldwin, a renowned African American author, and is entitled “Go tell it on the Mountain”. In this paper I will discuss the overarching theme that I found in this story. I feel that the dominant focus in this story was that of the battle between good and evil, or righteousness versus unrighteousness. This was bore out through the lives of the characters in the story, but primarily in the relationship between John Grimes, and his stepfather Gabriel Grimes.

Written by John Wesley Work Jr., the Negro Spiritual “Go Tell It on the Mountain” describes the story of a wayfaring seeker who would be lost without the help of God to show him the way (Scruggs 2). Sadly, the early life of prominent American writer James Baldwin tells a much different religious story, rife with spiritual alienation and hypocrisy. Baldwin grew up in a time when the Christian Church wielded an immense amount of power in terms of moral leadership and values (Henderson 90). Baldwin’s father, a minister himself, frequently took out his frustrations on James in the form of physical punishment, perverting the beliefs and values of the very church he claimed to serve (Harris 1). Furthermore, as a homosexual, African-American pastor