Religious Metaphors In The Story Of Langston's Salvation

Salvation describes the deliverance by God for those who believe in him. It is the saving of the soul from sin (and its consequences) through Gods will and grace. Though it takes different forms in every religion, the principle is still the same, often emphasising the necessity of both good works, repentance, and asceticism, as well as divine intervention (in this case the action being the grace of God). If assuming that Christ is the full truth, then the only way to gain access to God after death is through the salvation given by the Christian God. Jesus himself has indicated that a person must hear the word, believe it, repent of past sins, and be willing to confess faith before others, be baptized into Christ for the remission of sins, and then continue to live a faithful life throughout this physical life if we are to go to heaven.

His aunt is really excited about him joining the church community: “my aunt spoke of it days ahead”. With his aunt at the church, young Hughes gets sat in the front of the church and with the entire congregation looking at him and the other kids that were getting ready to be saved. One by one they all experience God and His divine touch up to the point where only Hughes is left sitting on the bench. After some more time, he decides that he would rather loose his belief in God and lie about his presence than to keep everyone else waiting and looking at him. He lies and gets up and moves to the “saved” side. By lying and pleasing the society, we find out the effect that this has on the congregation: “the whole room broke in a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise”[pg. 181].

'Salvation', by Langston Hughes is part of an autobiographical work written in 1940. The author narrates a story centering on a revival gathering that happened in his childhood. During the days leading up to the event, Hughes' aunt tells him repeatedly that he will be 'saved', stressing that he will see a light and Jesus will come into his life. He attends the meeting but when Jesus fails to appear, he is forced by peer pressure to lie and go up and be 'saved'. Hughes uses his story to illustrate how easy it is for children to misinterpret adults and subsequently become disillusioned.

In most people's lives, there comes a point in time where their perception changes abruptly; a single moment in their life when they come to a sudden realization. In Langston Hughes' 'Salvation', contrary to all expectations, a young Hughes is not saved by Jesus, but is saved from his own innocence.

Langston Hughes’ short essay, “Salvation,” is a controversial yet interesting story that brings many conflicts between people in society. He discusses his personal point of view about his religious experience. Although religion has impacted many people throughout the years, it is still an extremely debatable topic. Many people believe that if you go to church you’ll be good for the rest of your life and just because you convince them as kid to behave a certain way, it will stop them from making poor choices, but it does not always work that way. Religion has historically been a problem for so long; it has divided humanity in so many ways. This story represents how much religion can use fear to gain power, but it also brings a sense of hope

Langston Hughes’s personal narrative “Salvation” is a recollection of Hughes’s experience with salvation at a religious revival at his aunt’s church. He recounts his experience in order to describe how it led to his enormous guilt over deceiving his aunt and the congregation and how it stemmed his disbelief in religion. His ironic tone and vivid imagery plays a key role in the development of the conflict and the complications that he faces. In order to dramatize suspenseful moments and magnify key points, he uses an array of rhetorical devices.

In most people's lives, there comes a point in time where their perception changes abruptly; a single moment in their life when they come to a sudden realization. In Langston Hughes' "Salvation", contrary to all expectations, a young Hughes is not saved by Jesus, but is saved from his own innocence.

Salvation, as known by many different religions, is a sort of deliverance from the physical and spiritual aspects

In "Salvaiton", the main point that Hughes is trying to get across is that he "believed" in something only because it was what he was told was right. There is evidence of where he mentions "I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved." Hughes also mentions that one of his fellow peers at one point had said how "He was tired of sitting, so let's get up and get saved." It is clear that throughout the essay, Hughes delivers an image of confusion and seeing people as hypocrites and it really gives an understanding of what Hughes was going through. The structure of the essay also allows the reader to understand and follow the confusion and these experiences as they unfold on young Langston.

The pressure of seeing all his other peers also played a major role in his decision. His fear of being “left all alone on the mourners' bench” incited him to become saved. When he witnessed the last boy on the bench go fourth and be saved, Langston suddenly felt the pressure of the whole church come down on him. Especially that of his Aunt Reed, she sobbed to Langston "Langston, why don't you come? Why don't you come and be saved? Oh, Lamb of God! Why don't you come?" This was the last straw this pressure eventually caused Langston to get saved out of deceit. When Langston tried to go to bed that night his feelings of dishonesty had overcome him. He cried not tears of joy but tears of regret and confusion “But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.” He cried because he felt in his heart that he lied to his Aunt Reed and the whole church.

The details provided in the book explain the story moderately well. In the book, Langston writes about how much pressure he felt from the altar to be saved by Christ. The book paints a good visual picture on how crowded and hot the church was. In the book , Langston explains how devoted

Langston Hughes is one the most renowned and respected authors of twentieth century America not simply one of the most respected African-American authors, though he is certainly this as well, but one of the most respected authors of the period overall. A large part of the respect and admiration that the man and his work have garnered is due to the richness an complexity of Hughes' writing, both his poetry and his prose and even his non-fictions. In almost all of his texts, Hughes manages at once to develop and explore the many intricacies and interactions of the human condition and specifically of the experience growing up and living as a black individual in a white-dominated and explicitly anti-Black society while at the same time, while at the same time rendering his human characters and their emotions in a simple, straightforward, and immensely accessible fashion. Reading the complexity behind the surface simplicity of his works is at once enjoyable and edifying.

In Langston Hughes' poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", he examines some of the roles that blacks have played throughout history. Ultimately, the poem asserts that in every one of these aspects the black people have been exploited and made to suffer, mostly at the hands of white people. The poem is written entirely in first person, so there is a very personal tone, even though the speaker symbolizes the entire black race. The examples of each role cited in the poem are very specific, but they allude to greater indignities, relying on the readers' general knowledge of world history. To convey the injustice that has taken place, Hughes utilizes the symbolism of the

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In Langston Hughes 's autobiographical anecdote, “Salvation,” the author reflects on his childhood, and also examines the basis on which his religious views were founded. Hughes 's nonfiction piece, written in adulthood, allows him to look back on his past and reconsider what he learned about salvation, as well as organized religion and conformity, as a child. Because of this inquiry, he begins to question the ways in which adults pressure young people to conform to their views of religion, even without having the deep feeling of faith required. When people are young, they are often asked to conform to roles that they don’t really understand or think deeply about, and religious duty is thus carried on without a lot of free will. Langston Hughes divulges the hypocrisy and the fraudulent faith of the Church and its indoctrinated members through irony and his own indoctrination into his damning salvation. The church service pressures and bullies young Hughes into falsifying his salvation. This ceremony proves that the church values tradition over faith.