Critical Reading Post #3 A Lesson Before Dying
In the novel A Lesson Before Dying there is the recurring idea of heroes and what it means to be a hero. The first time this is really seen is in the Rainbow Room after Grant has returned from seeing Jefferson and the old men in the bar are talking about Jackie Robinson. The men in the bar know everything about Jackie. They know every detail of his career and can reenact highlights from some of his games. Jackie Robinson was the first black major league baseball player. In their community, Jackie Robinson is a hero. Grant reflects on how it felt when he was growing up and seeing Joe Louis fight. The entire community was effected by the results of the fight. They even prayed for him in church. These two men are heroes because they are doing extraordinary things that many other black men do not get the opportunity to do. They give other black people watching their accomplishments a sense of pride in who they are and where they come from that is often taken away from them. Grant asks Jefferson to be a hero in a less public, but just as important way. He asks Jefferson to die in a way that will make his family and the people living in his community proud. White men have taken everything from Jefferson, and now they will take his life. Grant describes a hero as someone who “would do anything for people he loves, because he knows it will make their lives better” (157). Grant goes on to explain to Jefferson that he is just as good as anyone else, including those who put him in jail and make him feel inferior. He goes on to try to convince Jefferson to believe that and if he stands and goes to the chair with pride in himself he will be giving his grandmother and his community pride and will become a hero in his own right.
I like that you bring up the idea of heroes. It’s really important, and I think it is really related to the idea of the making of an individual and a person. In some ways America at least is possessed of the idea that everyone can and should be a hero where hero in some way is not the demigod of Achilles, but the ideal of the everyday man.
I think this notion of heroes is a place you can definitely delve into more deeply in your paper. I want to encourage you though to go deeper into your close reading. You haven’t really applied one of our close reading strategies here. I mean you kind of do a follow the trail because you are showing instances of hero. But in as much as you identify the hero as a major theme, it’s not really a following the trail. These aren’t little parts that you track. They are major moments that you stand at. you could have decided to do a side by side of the passage discussing Jackie Robinson (which I believe includes Joe Luis) and some passage in which Grant (or the narrative) shows Jefferson to be heroic (or a passage where others are looking on Jefferson as heroic). Then you would need to grapple with the details of how these passage work. What literary techniques does Gaines use in each of the scene? What’s the effect? How do they overlap and where do they diverge?
Reckoning with the details of how the story, idea, mood, and images get portrayed is integral to close reading.