Analysis of Nobody Knows My Name by Baldwin

Analysis of Nobody Knows My Name by Baldwin

  • Submitted By: melissa357
  • Date Submitted: 03/04/2009 8:42 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1973
  • Page: 8
  • Views: 1088

“Nobody Knows my Name” Baldwin

How does Baldwin construct his writing to make a connection with the Reader? How does he produce an emotional response in the Reader?

“I began to try to re-create the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight. It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt.” (138). This is certainly a turning point in Baldwin’s life, he realizes who he is, not that he didn’t know who he was, but he comes to a deeper understanding of himself. He makes us feel like we are learning about the past, learning about himself. He transmits to us through his writing a little bit how he felt when he realized who he was. He instills curiosity and even a need for us to have our own soul searching experience. “I began to try to re-create the life that I had first known as a child” he is trying to go back to his childhood, and immediately I make a picture of him as a child in my mind, then instinctively I think of myself as a child. Then “and from which I had spent so many years in flight” he probably is thinking about the bad memories of his childhood and it makes me wonder what could possibly be so sad in his past that he tried to bury it for so long, I feel a certain sense of anguish and pity. “It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I must have spoken when I was a pickaninny” I immediately think of soul music, rhythm and blues, and imagine the tone and cadence. He produces interest in the Reader with this sentence and he also makes the reader think of the music that reminds us of our past, he brings up memories from his past but he doesn’t say anything, he just leaves the Reader wondering how his buried childhood was. “And to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt” I wonder what is it that he...

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