Literary Analysis: "The Man Who Was Almost a Man"

Literary Analysis: "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" by Richard Wright

Jared Korotney

November 30, 2015

            A lot of people can make good arguments as to which theme best suits the story, such as "quit while you're ahead" or "think before you act". While these themes do fit in with the story, I feel that the best theme to have the biggest impact on the story is "maturity is determined by your actions". I feel that this perfectly describes the story because it is an accurate description for the main character, Dave Sanders. He truly believes that he is mature enough to handle a gun, but his killing the mule shows otherwise, and to add insult to injury, he decides to run away from his problems, showing that he is not mature enough to handle his situation.

            Moving on to the setting. The short story stars, as I mentioned earlier, Dave Sanders, a 17-year-old African-American farm worker who tries to prove to his parents, boss, and his community that he is old and knowledgeable enough to buy and utilize a gun in order to orient himself into the Southern adult society that he is about to enter, age-wise. The plot starts out with Dave begging for hos parents to lend him two dollars in order to pay for the gun. Although they are very hesitant at first. they decide to let him buy the gun on one condition: it should belong to Dave's father. After he successfully buys the gun, he hides it from his parents and brings it to work with him the next day where his boss, Mr. Hawkins, tells him to go out into the field and bring the farm mule with him to plow the fields. While in the fields, he tries to shoot the gun, which he does, only to realize that he accidentally shot the mule and killed it. When he is coerced into confessing the shooting to his parents, boss, and community, Mr. Hawkins forgives him, but orders that Dave pay him two dollars a month in order to buy another mule. That night, he becomes irritated with the fact that he is now viewed as more of a child that he was before, as well as having to pay Mr. Hawkins for more than two years. He then runs away and jumps on a train in order to prove that he is a true man.

            The story is told in limited third-person point-of-view, which the outsider telling the story in Dave's perspective. The characterization of the story mainly applies to Dave, as his character is more developed to show that his view on what he wants to be seen as overshadows his realistic personality: an inexperienced, immature teenager who requires more knowledge about the real world in order that he can be accepted into the adult civilization in the South. There are also a few key points in the story in which irony is made prevalent. For example, situational irony occurs when at the very end of the story, Dave decides that in order for himself to be viewed as more mature and manly, he must run away from his responsibilities. 

            The biggest symbol in the story that can tie back to the theme of "experience versus inexperience" is the gun. The gun is a huge symbol for maturity, because only the strong-willed can accept full responsibility for using a loaded rifle. Dave is not mentally capable enough to handle the maturity that this gun brings, and it showed when he fired only one bullet and it hit the mule and killed it. Dave needed to be mature enough to also listen to his parents when they said that he must give the gun right to his father, a man who truly understands how dangerous handling a gun can be.

            So now, it's time for an overall analysis of the short story. Richard Wright did an outstanding job detailing a story of experience and maturity that many people could relate to to this day. If you ask me, the best group of people who should be reading this story are high-schoolers, because they are on that transitional path to adulthood, and many of them still lack the experience to understand the adult-oriented society. In fact, knowledgeable teachers and parents/guardians should also be involved in this story as they will have their own experiences related to this story that teenagers will need to know if they want to be ready for manhood. In terms of who would like this story, I would have to say an adult that lives in the South, because the story's location and plot can be very relatable to these adults, which is also beneficial in the sense that if these adults have kids, they can educate them in a "the boy who cried wolf" manner that relates to the story. 

Product Reviews

Product Reviews

by Jared Korotney

November 16, 2015

Product 1: GameBoy Advance GameShark

If you're the kind of person that does not like to work out that ridiculously complicated maze in that one video same, and you would rather cheat you way through the levels, this product is right for you. The GameBoy Advance GameShark was released at around the same time when the GameBoy Advance was released, back in 2001. With over 16,000 hacks already implemented into the device for many GameBoy Advance games, the GameShark is aimed towards children primarily between the ages of nine and sixteen, and can be used for competitive gaming, but the majority of buyers use it casually to access the next stages of a game. The device was use for hacking your game cartridge into doing things that would normally be impossible from standard play. These hacks included, but were not limited to, walking through walls, buying items for free, winning boss battles without actually battling them, having all the items in the game available to you with just a click of a button, and granting you every possible power-up that existed in the game. You insert you game cartridge into the GameShark slot, after which another external slot from the GameShark is inserted into the GameBoy Advance system, allowing you to cheat your way through your selected game. Another added bonus to the cheating device is that if you want to implement new codes into the GameShark, you may do so, and the device will save the cartridge for you, so you can use the cheat for a selected game at your leisure. There one noticeable flaw to this product, however. The GameShark is known to occasionally crash before your game is powered on, most likely due to an overbearing amount of cheats implemented into the cartridge at the same time. As a whole, it is a great product to have is you want to experience getting what you want when you want it, without any regrets (except for the system possibly crashing).

Product 2: Coca-Cola Jukebox

I got this particular miniature tabletop jukebox as a collection of Coca-Cola products from my grandfather a couple of years ago. However, I wasn't too sure of how well it would actually function. I was surprised to find out that not only is the music player in great condition, but it is decently valuable, able to sell for at least fifty dollars on sites such as eBay and Amazon. This particular model of a miniature Coca-Cola jukebox was made in the 1980's. The jukebox works like this: you insert a dime in the slot on top of the jukebox for one play or a quarter for two plays, and then you press one of five buttons that allows music to play through the back speaker. The system also required three double-A batteries for proper functioning. The best part about this product is that once the tune is finished playing, you can receive your coins back by clicking a red button on top of the jukebox, which opens a door on the back for you to retrieve your spent coins.  This product is more suited towards collectors and anyone interested in jukeboxes and/or the 1930's. The product is not entirely meant to act like an iPod or any other music player, but rather as a unique collector's item that can easily be accessible on popular selling sites like the ones mentioned, earlier. The only complaints about this product are that the song choices areextremely limited to five or ten songs. Also, when you play these songs, they only play for about ten seconds at a time. But, hey it's a collectible. It should not be too expected for a large abundance of music to come from this product, so having this product as a collectible is satisfying, nonetheless. Overall, I would highly recommend this as a rather unique collector's item to purchase.

Product 3: GameBoy Color

The Nintendo GameBoy Color handheld gaming system was released on November 18, 1998, in North America (October 21 in Japan). It was the first handheld console of its time to present full-blown monochrome colors like never seen before. As a sequel to the original GameBoy, the GameBoy Color kept several key functions from its original, such as the same control pads and link cables to connect with others. The system is more oriented towards (pre)teens, and allows for more casual play compared to more competitive gaming systems at the time, such as the PlayStation or the Nintendo 64. However, there were some aspects of the system that were frustrating to work with at the time. One prime example of this is the use of batteries. At the time, both systems required double-A batteries to allow the system to run properly, which became nightmare fuel when it came to working with the system. Luckily, Nintendo changed this aspect in 2003 with the release of the Gameboy Advance SP. Speaking of batteries, many gamers have complained about many of the games released for the system, not in terms of the content of the game, but because of the short battery lives the cartridges had, meaning that if you haven't played your games for a while, and you want to continue where you left off, you probably couldn't, because it would be a likely case that the memory would be wiped from the card, meaning that you would probably have to start your adventure all over, again.  Finally, a plaguing problem that affected the majority of GameBoy products was screen lighting. You need to have some sort of bright light, whether the sun shining through your window or a flashlight, to allow for proper viewing of the system, and the GameBoy Color was the worst offender of all of these products since color was just implemented into these games, and many consumers struggled to have a proper viewing experience worse than the original GameBoy. These were the biggest complaints about the new, colorized GameBoy system. It was a great system, but these bad features tainted the image of the system's performance capabilities.