A Lesson before Dying by Earnest Gaines - Book Report/Review Example

A Lesson before Dying by Earnest Gaines The novel A Lesson before Dying was written in 1993. In this work, Earnest Gaines depicts racial inequalities and segregation, oppression and injustice typical for the rural South Similar to other works, A Lesson before Dying reflects life troubles and hardship faced by the author during his childhood. Thesis The novel is based on biographical materials and can be seen as a narration of early years he spent on the plantation. The setting of the novel is the world of Louisiana ay the end of 1940s. The main character, Grant Wiggins, is a school teacher at plantation who is strong enough to leave the plantation and receive an education. These events reflect life and aspirations of Ernest J. Gaines. In the novel, he skillfully depicts the land: “Above, a low ashen sky loomed over the plantation, if not over the entire state of Louisiana. A swarm of black birds flew across the road and alighted in a pecan tree in one of the backyards ...” (Gaines 107). The author was born in 1933 during the heart of the depression, in Oscar, Louisiana, and worked his early years in the rural plantation fields that later wind through his fiction (Budd 3). Similar to the main characters of the book, Grant Wiggins, Jefferson, Miss Emma, Tante Lou and others, Gaines knew early the bittersweet life of the southern black family and community, broken and reset, pained and healing, and recalls himself working at age nine as a field hand chopping in hardscrabble for fifty cents a day (Budd 6). “By focusing his narrative on the execution of an innocent man, … Gaines is able to explore the structure of communal association and to imply the possibility for social change” (Folks 259). Like Grant Wiggins, he came to his calling young, because Gaines was one of the few on the old place who had the gift of language. His halting words kept his people in tenuous contact with themselves and a larger world, and they kept him busy, interpreting official notices, writing letters, reading the Bible aloud, or dramatizing newspaper accounts of brighter lives, black and white, that brought hope. The plantation is depicted as an isolated world ordered by its own rules and principles. Hated by black and white, they have only recently worked up to the land from the bayous, and they hold on tenaciously. The "old ways" become doubly important in their eyes. :”Jefferson is a dynamic character who, along with Grant Wiggins, Tante Lou, Miss Emma, and others, becomes a center of agency in the novel by virtue of his decision to reject a victimized status” (Folk 260). Grant is trusted by black and white alike. Similar to Gaines, he comes to believe that he can act on principles, with dignity, without rejecting his entire racial history. The world of the blacks living at the plantation is at once utterly defined. The novel includes many characters which bear resemblance with his relatives and friends. Similar to the character of Jefferson, Gaines received education from the old people who came to his Aunt Augustine's home. In the novel he depicts: “But just as Miss Emma had given so much of herself to that family, so had my aunt. So Henri Pichot, who cared nothing in the world for me, tolerated me because of my aunt. ...” (Gaines 21). His biographer (Budd 1991) underlines that this education he carries with him and in his writing to this day. Gaines depicts his aunt: “it was my aunt and she never walked a day in her life. And she used to look after us children” (Gaines, Lowe 16). His fiction lives in the daily sorrow songs and gut-bucket blues of poor southern black folks, speaks of those hot doldrums, weary and long as the delta is flat, and the saving bursts of darkness that pull a life lovingly and violently together and apart. The plantation and blackness was ‘a prison’ from which a black man can never escape. Following Folks: The importance of A Lesson Before Dying rests in the novel's acceptance of a Southern folk culture about which Gaines has demonstrated considerable ambivalence through most of his career. In this novel, Gaines has achieved a greater clarity and perspective in his presentation of the workings of an entire cultural system (259). In this novel, Gaines underlines that there is little possibility anywhere in his world: South and North are equally unacceptable, and he is thrown back on his own scant devices, faced with the need to make a livable existential present from his isolation. Gaines suggests that Grant’s need to vaunt the wall of his past is a form of racial self loathing. His black past is a wall, shutting off the light. Old people are not numerous here and, though they do indeed live and think in "old ways," they are treated sympathetically in Grant’s account. Using the character of Grant, Gaines depicts his childhood dreams and ideals, hopes and aspirations. It is possible to say that the character of is a prototype of Gaines himself reflecting his attitudes and values, relations with other people and his past. He depicts: “He had known me all my life, and he knew my aunt and all my people before me, but since I had gone off to the university and returned as a teacher” (Gaines 40). When Gaines was fifteen, his family traced the path of many postwar southern blacks, chasing the dreams and jobs held out by a booming northern industrial economy. They drove north and west, to his stepfather's merchant marine position in Vallejo, California, settling there in 1948 (Budd 8). in the novel, Gaines mentions: “My mother and father also told me that if I was not happy in Louisiana, I should come to California. After visiting them the summer following my junior year at the univer- sity, I came back, which pleased my aunt. ..." (Gaines 102). The sense of sparseness characterizing A Lesson before Dying may well be a function of the vision informing the novel: that is, the emphasis on structural parallels and motifs might be seen as a literary means of miming the bleak helplessness pervading the lives of Gaines's characters. The remarkable feature of this novel is that its characters seem destined to scribe patterns, painfully and mechanically. Following Gaines is a firmly rooted man, an uncommon meld of humility and a quiet pride. He has eschewed political battles over the last decade, not because he lacks strong opinions or fears uttering them in difficult times but because he is convinced that the human story held in the craft of fiction is the writer's most eloquent voice. In the novel, Gaines uses folk works, black dialects and idioms, the vignettes and tales, the texture of manners and ways of post-plantation life (Budd 11). These techniques allow him to stress characters emotions and life troubles. Budd notes that Gaines's recurring themes: revolve around the conflict of eras. The new world of mobility and expanded possibilities impinges on the old world of land love and solid, accepted social stratification. The old realities of the plantation culture gradually surrender to the demands of industrial pace and technology” (34). Grant’s narration, particularly as he paraphrases what others about him have seen and told, allows Gaines to work more deeply in the black oral narration, to flavor events with a natural richness of observation and response. In A Lesson Before Dying, the conflicts and disorders are dramatized, and rendered as functions of the lives of fully developed characters. The world of plantation bears an air of active spirits, a world slowly eaten up by sharecropping, with an "old side" worked by blacks and the entirety owned by the owner, Henry Pichot. The ways of an Afro-American past are also more densely realized in the individual lives of poor blacks living on the plantation. The important issue of the novel is social injustice and racism which affects all characters and their destinies. Gaines emperies the role and uniqueness of Jefferson, on his development to a point where he believes once more in his ability to act and shape his own dignity and life and in the need for black people to shape their histories rather than be enslaved by them. Grant does begin to recognize social realities in large terms, for instance, that they manipulate "the little people." Jefferson’s history revives Gaines’ own distant past, and the past eventually reveals the possibility of individual existential choice and action (Budd 65). Gaines carefully constructs the repetition of key scenes and emphasizes character evolution. The character of Grant focuses on individual growth similar to personal life of Gaines. This character is alive and seems to evolve naturally. In his personal life, Gaines graduated from San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College) in 1957 and spent several years in Wallace Stegner's writing seminars at Stanford University (Budd 11). An adopted son, he continues to live quietly in the Bay Area. While he has lived most of his life in California, the time spent there has not been worked easily into his fiction. In sum, the uniqueness of the novel is that it reflects feelings and memories of the author, his values and hopes. He criticizes segregation and racism, and offers a reconciliation between a black man and his historical past and his need for dignity and greater freedom. The emphasis is on the simultaneous growth of several people toward maturity and secondarily on the growth of a race toward true autonomy. Through the main characters, a the character of Grant in particular, Gaines tells readers about the era, generations, values, and the personal and historical dimensions. Works Cited 1. Budd, V. Ernest Gaines. Twayne Publishers, 1991. 2. Gaines, E. A Lesson Before Dying. Vintage; 1997. 3. Gaines, E. Conversations With Ernest Gaines. ed. J. Lowe. Scholarly Book Services Inc, 2002.   4. Folks, J. J. Communal Responsibility in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson before Dying. The Mississippi Quarterly 52 (1999), 259-263. Read More