Langston Hughes Salvation Summary
I cannot cut out a piece of my head and give it to you. Unfortunately, lobotomies performed by untrained individuals such as myself tend to end in death. Even if I did manage to harvest a little piece of my brain and live long enough to place it in your hand, you would only have a lifeless, squishy mass of tissue that used to be inside of my skull. There would be no memories or emotions; you would be no closer to understanding my experiences or me as a person. That’s the thing about the human mind: it is not a physical entity. There is no scientific method to appreciating what another person has been through. So how do we, as humans, explain ourselves and elicit empathy and compassion?
This is where a beautiful thing called language comes in. …show more content…
This is the part of the brain that controls everything related to vision. A storyteller might describe what they have seen to give you a sense of place and help you imagine what it looked like to be there with the writer. In his short story “Salvation,” Langston Hughes uses this part of narration to describe the elderly of his church. “A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands.” Even this small description is enough to help a reader start to put themselves in Hughes’ shoes. Visualization is the beginning of understanding another …show more content…
The cerebellum is in charge of fear, pleasure, and attention, all things a writer can use to explain themselves to a reader. We are all familiar with feeling scared or happy, so this is a great way for readers to connect with narrators in moments when these feelings overwhelmed them. In her essay “Mission Iraq,” Allison Perkins details her fear and disorientation her first time in a war zone. “I felt lost between reality and this strange place that somehow seemed like it couldn’t really exist. It was a world where danger waited at every turn…” Perkins’ description gives the reader the ability to dive just a little deeper into the narrator’s thoughts and emotions at the
This is where a beautiful thing called language comes in. …show more content…
This is the part of the brain that controls everything related to vision. A storyteller might describe what they have seen to give you a sense of place and help you imagine what it looked like to be there with the writer. In his short story “Salvation,” Langston Hughes uses this part of narration to describe the elderly of his church. “A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands.” Even this small description is enough to help a reader start to put themselves in Hughes’ shoes. Visualization is the beginning of understanding another …show more content…
The cerebellum is in charge of fear, pleasure, and attention, all things a writer can use to explain themselves to a reader. We are all familiar with feeling scared or happy, so this is a great way for readers to connect with narrators in moments when these feelings overwhelmed them. In her essay “Mission Iraq,” Allison Perkins details her fear and disorientation her first time in a war zone. “I felt lost between reality and this strange place that somehow seemed like it couldn’t really exist. It was a world where danger waited at every turn…” Perkins’ description gives the reader the ability to dive just a little deeper into the narrator’s thoughts and emotions at the