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A Lesson Before Dying Analysis

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A Lesson Before Dying is a deceptively simple novel that explores numerous complex themes. Which also explores a prison experience. Set in the fictional community of Bayonne, Louisiana, in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying tells the story of Jefferson, a twenty-one-year-old uneducated black field worker wrongfully accused and convicted of the robbery and murder of a white man, and sentenced to death by electrocution.
Gaines uses harsh language to reflect the spiritual and personal alienation of humans in the twentieth century. In a sense, this book is more about the injustice in the world thanks to racism than actually presenting a treatise on how to live life. Yet arguably, we can infer such lessons from the way in which the novel presents us with a world where obvious injustice and inhumanity exists. Clearly, the conviction and execution of Jefferson is a prime example of this injustice deriving from racism. The way that he innocently accepts a ride from two men and then is implicated in a violent struggle, in spite of his lack of understanding of what is really happening, is enough to give him the death sentence.
Ernest J. Gaines who was born in Oscar Louisiana who is a writer whose fiction, as exemplified by The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), his most acclaimed work, reflects African American experience and the oral tradition of his rural Louisiana childhood. The three primary characters I chose would be Tante Lou, Miss Emma, and Reverend Ambrose. I

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