Comparison of Two Narrators with Respect to Problem Resolution
Two short stories, one by Langston Hughes titled "Salvation" and one by Anna Quindlen titled "Mothers" are narrated by characters who experience major traumas and develop responses to those traumas that are representative of their varying levels of maturity and capacity for a creative response to an admittedly difficult and potentially traumatic situation. Hughes (1) is writing of himself in describing a young man who was "saved from sin" when he was about 13 although he actually lied about meeting and encountering Jesus. Quindlen (31) describes how, as a grown up women, she copes with reminders of the mother-daughter relationship she lost forever at the age of 19 when her own mother died. Of the two narrators, it is Quindlen who emerges as best able to cope with the loss she experienced as a young woman, largely because she has had a great deal of time to accept her loss and the imagination to create almost endless possibilities about what a mother-daughter relationship could have been.
Langston Hughes (1) was only 13 when he was challenged at a church revival to let Jesus into his life and to "see and feel and hear Jesus" in his soul. As a pubescent male, Hughes was literal in his expectations that he would see Jesus and be embraced by Jesus while members of his aunt's church prayed around him. He did not possess the imagination or the knowledge needed to understand that perhaps "seeing" Jesus or letting him into one's life was as much a spiritual and mental achievement as a physical one. He is not sufficiently mature or experienced to recognize that he is being pressured by praying adults to acknowledge a figurative event as a literal one. Consequently, he is embarrassment as he is the only child who does not see Jesus. Instead he lies and tells the congregation that he did see Jesus.
In contrast, Anna Quindlen (31-32) is writing at some distan...