Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
by Amiri Baraka (1961)
Explorations of the Text
1) The
speaker’s mood seems to be numb and discouraging as he was so used to the same
happening in his life and he portrays “the ground opens up and envelops him”. As
if it buried his own self and soul of living.
2) The
significance of the daughter’s gesture of peeking into “her own clasped hands”
is to show that she is praying. The daughter probably praying to the God so
that things will go well for her parents, because she was to talking to someone
but “there is no one there...”. The speaker saw that her daughter praying to
the God that unseen to anyone in the world.
3) The
title “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” means a note that will probably
wrote by someone who can no longer go on in life. The speaker keep going about
his depression of the same things in his life but in the last line he saw his
daughter praying; “Her own clasped hands.” The daughter prays so that her
parent will not giving up life by going into suicide no matter how rough the
front path of living.
4) The
three short lines seem to picture the different transmission of the stages in
the speaker’s life. The poem initially describing how the speaker felt about
his everyday life and he said; “Things have come to that.”, which is his life
before was always the same stuffs, while in the second part the poem describe about his
life now and the line “Nobody sings anymore.” This portrays about how his life
became almost lost of all its excitement and fun. While the last part in my
opinion he finally did came to a little hope, when he saw his daughter praying
in “Her own clasped hand”. He might actually go on in the end.
5) Baraka’s
initial point of the flow when he begin with “Lately”, as it was before he
realise his life going wrong, and then followed by “and now”. This could be the
climax of his hopeless condition and he ended by “and then”. This will be the
final stage of the poem which we witness the ending of the whole tale.
6) All
of this time the speaker might didn’t feel anything about his own daughter
because he thought himself as living in the same desperate and depressing
things for every day of his life by stating;
“And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.”
But in the end when he saw his daughter praying, something come to him and mostly the reader, that there is more to hope than nothing good of coming from suicide, the girl represents hope and the need for him to move on for the sake of her.
And each night I get the same number.”
But in the end when he saw his daughter praying, something come to him and mostly the reader, that there is more to hope than nothing good of coming from suicide, the girl represents hope and the need for him to move on for the sake of her.
Works Cited
Schmidt, Jan Zlotnik. And
Lynne Crockett. Portable Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Nonfiction.
United States of America: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009.
References
"Themes and Meaning" Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition Ed. Philip K. Jason. Salem Press,
Inc. 2002 eNotes.com 28 Sep, 2013 <http://www.enotes.com/topics/preface-twenty-volume-suicide-note/themes#themes-themes-and-meanings>
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