Essays on Cora

Introduction

It was a unique time in history; slavery had been abolished, Jim Crow las were in effect but the civil rights movement had not yet begun. Voices like Langston Hughes spoke out against the racial oppression. Hughes himself wrote many short stories, poems and plays in his time. One of the themes that repeats itself in the works of Hughes is the word “mulatto”. “Mulatto”, a word used to describe a person of mixed black and white heritage, elicits a negative feeling or response from most people given the prejudiced nature of the word. Due to the negative nature ...

At 4:00am, my alarm clock begins to go off. Still exhausted from the night before, I begin to rise out of bed. In the middle of winter, it’s dark outside. The house is freezing. I take a deep breath and get out of bed to begin my day. As a single mother raising three children, I work two jobs just to make ends meet. I am due to report to my first job, at the local hotel, at 6:00am sharp. It’s minimum wage and physically grueling work, but it’s a job that puts food on the ...

Narrative point of view refers to the position of the narrator in relation to the story that one is narrating. As such, when evaluating the point of view of the narrator, one focuses on the relationship between the narrator and the characters in the story. There are three major points of view that narrators can adopt while narrating a story. These are first-person, second-person, and third-person point of views. Either of the foregoing points of views have different effect on the understanding and believability of the characters or the story being told, as is evident from O Pioneers! and ...