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Maya Angelou has several points in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her primary point involves both the strength and the beauty in inherent to the human spirit. Despite all adversity, her book and life story stresses, greatness can still be accomplished. It is impossible to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings without a sense of what the girl in the book would become; not only does the public already have knowledge of the name emblazoned on the front of the book, but the book was also necessarily written from the perspective of greatness having already been achieved. In this way, Angelou is also making a point about what telling a life story means, and the effect it has on the truth and on one's self-image. In some ways, the book appears to be a sort of healing process for Angelou, while at the same time the book appears to be primarily...
Her description of the fight with Joe Louis is a prime example of a real event that Angelou skillfully manipulates to symbolic status. Like Angelou herself, Louis' victory in his boxing match is evidence that no matter how downtrodden a person is due to their race or other circumstances, victory and success can be achieved. The entire African-American community of Stamps takes Louis' victory as a sign of their own worth; he becomes a symbol for what they are all hoping to attain.
In McTeague, Norris applied the caged bird motif to illustrate the protagonist's chained existence that was at the mercy of naturalistic forces. As the canary is moved from place to place, so is the protagonist forced to move from one experience to another until he dies. It symbolizes the protagonist's life and death experiences. When McTeague finally dies near the end as he is handcuffed with a corpse, we see
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings One of the lasting moments in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the explicit rape scene in the novel. In the story, the young narrator is raped by her mother's boyfriend. This moment in the book has been mislabeled as a form of child pornography, but anyone reading the story can testify that this is not a moment told in
This attempt at banning this book cannot be seen as anything but another example of prejudice and racism, this time against a woman who is attempting to share her life and warn other young girls at the same time. Probably one of the most eye-opening parts of the book is when Angelou acknowledges that for decades, blacks in the South acquiesced to whites simply to survive, and they taught these
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, she illustrated her coming of age as an intelligent but unconfident black girl in the American South during the 1930s and afterwards in California during the 1940s. Angelou's parents' divorce when she was three years old and sent her and her older brother, Bailey, to stay with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, which was rural Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom they
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been widely classified as an African-American autobiography, which chronicles the experiences of a young, black girl in the America of the 1930s. While undoubtedly the work is a valuable contribution to the genre of African-American history, describing as it does the plight of black women living during a time of racial and sexual oppression, it
San Francisco is a place of greater opportunity than anywhere in the South offered her; there are fewer freedoms than she discovered in Mexico or in the junkyard, perhaps, but these restrictions are attendant on the opportunities afforded her. Angelou's ability to imagine those opportunities carried on the sea breeze or just over the crest of each successive hill of the San Francisco marks her successful journey in the