Middle Passage Johnson

In Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, we are treated to a work that is half slave-narrative and half seafaring-adventure. The African holocaust as it exists in literature originally came into being from oral reports and slave narratives from slaves who had learned to read and write. Thus, many slave narratives give readers a firsthand but detached account of not the slave but of the slavery institution instead. Detached and observational in account, works devoted to the African holocaust in the late 19th and early 20th centuries horrified and titillated readers with accounts of abominable cruelties inflicted on slaves at the hands of cruel and abusive white slave owners. However, modern works that convey experiences of the African holocaust do not allow the reader any such detached perspective. Instead, works by Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson involve us in a relationship with the individual slave, a perspective we are drawn into by the use of fragmented stream of consciousness and other techniques commonly associated with the style known as magical realism. In this way, authors like Johnson attempt to bridge the gap between the reader and the individual slave experience as presented, i.e., brought into existence, via text.

The institution of slavery is defamiliarized in Middle Passage. Instead the authority of the story is bestowed upon its narrator, a modern day Huck Finn kind of character who is black and edu

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id nothing. Surely you can understand why. (Johnson 100) As in the works of authors such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, the narrator's tone seems to be one of appreciation for being able to advance himself within a progressive movement of society and culture. This is an ex-slave who now makes reference to classical Greek civilization and religious philosophy "As so often happens with sick people who can get no satisfaction from quacks and country doctors, he turned to theology and found in Thomas and the Psuedo-Dionysus a solace that eased his pilgrimage through a broken world" (Johnson 111). Calhoun is not only wily like Odysseus when it comes to rhetoric, but he is also erudite because of the attempts of his former master to educate him. In this story, while we see the horrors and abuses of the middle passage which slave took from Africa to America, we also see appreciation from an ex-slave who was able to advance himself because of the kindness of some slave owners. As Calhoun says of his former slave master, the Reverend Peleg Chandler "A funny old man, I'd have to say, with the soul of a celibate or contemplative. Yet he was, in most sense of the word, a fair, sympathetic, and well-meaning man, as w

Category: Literature - M