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A Gathering of Old Men Unit of Study
Point of View in A Gathering of Old Men Lesson Plan
By Marshall Surratt
Reading assignment: Chapters 1-3 of A Gathering of Old Men
Overview
In his best works, An Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines skillfully blends a first-person point of view with the inflections of different characters; but perhaps, he most ambitiously uses point of view in A Gathering of Old Men, in which Gaines chooses 17 different first-person narrators. This lesson facilitates understanding of the first three chapters of the novel by examining point of view.
Student Objectives
Students will:
- Learn different points of view used by an author, including first person, third person objective, and third person omniscient.
- Analyze and evaluate different narrative points of view in their own writing.
- Gain an understanding of why an author chooses a particular point of view.
- Analyze and evaluate the validity of primary source materials, and identify the point of view from which they were constructed.
Materials
Book, A Gathering of Old Men
The Lesson
Anticipatory Set
- To explain point of view, you could introduce students to some well-known stories that have been retold from a different point of view. Examples include the following:
- Jon Scieszka's The True Story Of The 3 Little Pigs, told from the perspective of the wolf.
- Alvin Granowsky's reworked stories, such as The Three Billy Goats Gruff/Just a Friendly Old Troll, Giants Have Feelings, Too/Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.
- John Gardner's Grendel, told from the perspective of the monster hunted by Beowulf.
Of course, Sciezka and Granowsky were writing children's books for entertainment, and Gardner was playing with literary conventions. The subject of Gaines' book is much more serious: the experiences of African Americans since the days of slavery.
- Point out to students that an author's use of point of view and tone often are related. A possible example here is Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The story is told by the adult Pip (the central character), but Dickens does not let the reader know all that the adult Pip knows. As the story unfolds, the narrator relates events as he understood them at the time. This perspective reveals how Pip as a young boy and an overly ambitious young man had misunderstood events and the motivations of others. It is this difference between what the young Pip grasped and what the adult Pip will come to understand that contributes to a sense of poignancy in Dickens' novel.
Procedures
Use the following questions for discussion as students begin reading the first chapters.
Questions For Discussion
- Why does Gaines need multiple narrators in this book? Hint for students:
- What knowledge will each person reveal?
- If some of these injustices have gone unreported or haven't been prosecuted, who knows about them?
[There are two possible purposes. This technique is used to show the transformation of the men to becoming more assertive, but it also will allow them to tell stories of injustice against them and their families, including the rape of a sister, being forced from a farm, and not being honored for service in war.]
- Originally, Gaines had intended to use as narrator, Lou Dimes, a sympathetic white reporter with ties to the quarters through his relationship with Candy, the niece of the white couple whose family had owned the plantation where the black sharecroppers had worked and their ancestors had been slaves. "The original idea," Gaines told an interviewer, "was that Lou Dimes was a 'liberal white guy' who's played basketball with blacks, who sees a relationship with Candy and Mathu and between Mapes and Mathu, sees something bout these old men, and from a liberal viewpoint is learning and trying to understand and tell it" (Conversations with Ernest Gaines, 167).
But Dimes could not understand or reveal to readers all the inner thinking of the African-American characters. How would the impact of the story have been different if Dimes had been the single narrator?
- Noting the title, why did Gaines make the protagonists plural? Why couldn't this be told from the perspective of one person? What is Gaines saying about how struggles against inequality have affected, as a group, black men and the community he calls "the quarter?" What might he be saying about the value of strength in numbers in resisting injustice?
- The first three voices are those of the young boy, a black woman, and a white, "liberal" woman. Each of them is anxious, confused, or frightened at events that have not yet been revealed to the reader. Why does Gaines begin with the first chapter told from the vantage point of a young boy, who carries the report that a white overseer has been killed? How do these secondary characters build anticipation in the readers and prepare the way for the main characters?
Hint for students: T his technique is prevalent in literature. It was a favorite of Shakespeare. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, we learn about Romeo first through his friends, before he appears on stage.
- Point out to students that, in subsequent chapters, Gaines will shift from the actions of a young white woman to the viewpoints of the older African-American men. What do the students think this will signify? [The men's voices are heard more as they gain confidence in themselves and their ability to decide their own fate.]
Additional Research
- In the events leading up to the Civil War, the United States was increasingly divided about how to deal with slavery. The conflict sharply escalated with the Compromise of 1850. This Congressional Act admitted California as a free state and Utah and New Mexico as separate territories that could decide the question of slavery--
and made illegal the selling and buying of slaves in Washington, D.C. However, it also included a strict law helping southern slave owners recover runaway slaves. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, seemed to solidify this position, ruling that slavery could not be outlawed.
- Refer students to textbook accounts of slavery or oral narratives of runaway slaves or freed slaves. Compare these with accounts of white abolitionists and slave owners. Have students, in a writing assignment, answer the following questions:
- Which group is more believable?
- What details make the different accounts seem more credible?
- To what extent did different motives, beliefs, and interests color the perspective of the pro-slavery arguments?
- Some of the most-important anti-slavery texts can be found online in their entirety. One of the first Americans to write against slavery was the Puritan Samuel Sewall. In The Selling of Joseph, A Memorial, published in 1700, Sewall presented religious arguments against slavery. (The full text is available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h301t.html.) Sewell compared slavery in the colonies to the Biblical account of the selling of Joseph into slavery. Anticipating the argument that removing Africans from a pagan country might Christianize them, Sewell wrote: "Evil must not be done, that good may come of it." He also argued that, in adopting slavery, colonists were going against the principles they espoused. Sewall wrote that it was "most lamentable to think, how in taking Negroes out of Africa, and selling them here, that which God has joined together men do boldly rend asunder; men from their country, husbands from their wives, parents from their children."
- During the summer of 1831, a slave in Virginia, Nat Turner, led a slave revolt. He and his followers killed 60 people. Turner was quickly captured. Before his execution, he dictated what was published the following year as The Confessions of Nat Turner. It can also found online at several sites, including the "Documenting the American South" site:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/turner/turner.html.
- Perhaps the best-known anti-slavery text from the 19th century is that penned by Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave who became an outspoken abolitionist. In 1845, his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published. The text is available online at several sites, including the Berkeley Digital Library: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/.
Have students pay special attention to the claims of slave owners--
for example, that they were providing for slaves who otherwise could not help themselves--
with the conditions and events that Douglass recalls. Note especially Douglass' use of irony, understatement, and logic. Do students think this is as effective as a more-vindictive tone? What stereotypes might Douglass' audience have had about African Americans, for example, about their intellectual capability? Might Douglass have been trying to controvert this prejudice? (See Lesson Three for further suggestions about teaching Douglass' narrative.)
- Another text that might be assigned for reading is Henry David Thoreau's essay titled "Slavery in Massachusetts," first delivered at an abolitionist rally in 1854. It is also available online at several sites, including the Thoreau Reader: http://eserver.org/thoreau/slavery.html.
Thoreau's refusal to pay poll taxes in opposition to slavery was credited with inspiring the civil disobedience of Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau wrote about the duty to follow one's conscience in his essay "On Civil Disobedience" available at: http://eserver.org/thoreau/civil.html.
Additional Resources
Books (with slave narrative collections)
Blassingame, John W., Ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: LSU Press, 1977.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. Rpt. New York: Signet, 2000.
Yetman, Norman R., Ed. Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. Mineola, New York: Dover, 2000.
Internet Resources:
- Online collections of slave narratives:
- Both proslavery and antislavery arguments:
Further Reading
Bowman, Paddy, Sylvia Bienvenu, and Maida Owens. "Oral Traditions: Swapping Stories."
http://www.louisianavoices.org/Unit5/edu_unit5.html
Gaudet, Marcia. "Folklore in the Writing of Ernest J. Gaines." The Griot. 3:9-16, 1984.
Lowe, John, Ed. Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995.
Smith, John David. An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985.
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