Caged Bird Essay, Research Paper

No one has ever said that life is easy, especially those that lived during the 1930 s and 40 s in an era known as The Great Depression. During the

depression, life was an on going struggle for all. In the South, it seemed

that African Americans suffered the greatest. When the novel I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is read, a door is opened to a world that most try to forget. Maya Angelou is able to describe her experiences growing up in the south in such a vivid way through her use of literary techniques such as ____, ____, and ____. Her exquistite techniques allows the reader to experience the events of Maya s life right along side of her.

Maya Angelou uses an aphoristic style similar to that of Ralph

Waldo Emerson s. This style is greatly used to express the tensions that occur within the south. She writes concisely about life s little secrets. By

describing events that occurred while she was growing up, she

intentionally implies that she wasn t any sort of exception, but that

everything that happened to her happened ten fold to others. An instance of this is shown when her and her grandma were trying to hide her brother, Bailey, from the Ku Klux Klan. The group of white supremacist were killing off young black men without giving them the chance to prove their innocence, simply because

they felt that blacks were not worthy enough to share the same air as

them. Conflicts between the Ku Klux Klan and blacks occured more often than not in the south, so Maya wasn t only painting a picture of an event that occured rarely in the south, but an everyday occurance that many were forced to deal with within their lives. …looks good. The black man hasn t even begun to storm the

battlefront. This quote can be taken in many different ways. I take it

as a boast of sorts, Look how far blacks have come; look at what they have accomplished, and they haven t even begun to put up a fight. Just imagine what they are capable of doing. When Maya describes the speech given at

her graduation, when the teacher says that some graduates have been able

to become athletes, Maya is angered, but is smart enough to know that

this was the typical assumption of even blacks: A black person could

never amount to anything, because of the limitation’s society has set for

them.

Maya also uses many asides throughout the novel, meaning she

often speaks to the audience formally, but none of the characters can

hear her. An example of this was giving in the beginning of the novel when Maya shows her disgust by her grandmother s unfailing subservience towards white people, and her tendency to play dumb while in the presence of the white folk. We get the feeling, through Maya s writing, that her grandmother is a surprisingly smart woman by the confusion that these actions arouse in Maya. This also foreshadows early in the novel that Maya has a long harsh road ahead of her in which she unveils the reasoning behind her grandmother s strange behavior.