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Style in Two Short Stories

This study will critique the authors of two short stories, Langston Hughes ("Who's Passing For Who?") and Claude McKay ("Myrtle Avenue"), focusing on characteristics of the styles of the authors. The study will argue that Hughes has a much more simple, leisurely and ironic style than McKay, which serves his more humorous attitude toward race and gender relations in Harlem. McKay, on the other hand, employs a more complex, earnest and emotional style which serves his more critical attitude toward relations among blacks and the sexes in the African-American community.

This is not to say that Hughes does not consider his subject to be serious and significant. To the contrary, Hughes clearly believes race and gender relations to be a vital and dynamic element of relationships in the United States. However, the style and attitude he demonstrates in this short story are aimed at producing a more light-hearted portrayal than the one painted by McKay.

Hughes plays with the reader's perceptions in the same way that the white couple in his story plays with the perceptions of the narrator. That narrator immediately adopts a cynical and superior attitude toward whites as well as toward the blacks who seem eager to accept the "help" (Hughes 564) proferred by whites, especially white tourists like the couple in the story. The narrator mocks Caleb, a black friend, as well as the white couple Caleb is showing around Harlem:

Friends are friends and, unfortunately, overearnest uplifters and uplifters---no matter what color they

may be. If it were the white race that was ground

down instead of Negroes, Caleb Johnson would be one

of the first to offer Nordics the sympathy of his utterly inane society, under the impression that somehow he would be doing them a great deal of good (Hughes 564).

But Hughes quickly shows that the black narrator has a measure of self-awareness with respect to his own shortcomings: "We literary ones . . ....

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Style in Two Short Stories. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:23, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701305.html