A Lesson Before Dying Lit Crit Outline

I. Introduction

A. The end is near. With minutes left in his life, the straps are being tightened, the electrodes are being placed and the audience is in their sets, ready to witness the death of young Jefferson.

B. In a small Cajun community, in the 1940’s, a young man named Jefferson finds himself in the wrong place in the wrong time and ends up accused with murder. Jefferson is sentenced to death and it is up to the local school teacher, Grant Wiggins, to convince Jefferson of his own self worth before dying.

C. In Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying he validates his theme of injustice and self sacrifice through the use of the courthouse setting to demonstrate the unfairness and racism towards black people during the 1940’s, the main character, Grant, to show the conflict between personal desire and responsibility, and the electric chair to provide an emotion provoking, concrete symbol of fear and death.

II. Background Information

A. Author’s Work

1. Ernest J. Gaines is a contemporary novelist and short story writer that writes about poor, uneducated, black people from his native area of southern Louisiana.

2. (Bryant 165)

B. Context

1. Gaines draws his influence from his own native southern upbringing where blacks were victimized, poor, and uneducated.

2. (Bryant 167)

III. Thesis Point One

A. Gaines uses the setting of the courthouse to demonstrate the unfairness towards black people during the 1940’s

1. In a courtroom with an all white jury, Gaines character, Jefferson, never had a chance at a fair trial.

a. “What you see here is a thing that acts on command[,] a thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn”

b. The use of the word “thing” illustrates that the inequality towards blacks during the 1940’s. They were not considered a human but merely a thing and later even referred to Jefferson as a hog.

c....