20 pages • 40 minutes read
James BaldwinGoing To Meet The Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Flashback
A flashback is the telling of a story that happened before the story's present narration. In the case of this Baldwin story, the present narration is the night the adult Jesse lays in bed, sleepless, with his wife, Grace. There are two levels of flashback in this story. First, Jesse jumps back to the immediate past, recounting to his wife what happened with the young man at the jail earlier that day. As Jesse tells this story, the protestors' singing causes him to remember the words of another African-American spiritual, thus triggering a flashback to his childhood. The recent flashback explains why Jesse can't sleep and the more distant flashback explains why the present day's events affected him so deeply. The childhood flashback also shows how Jesse's present-day racism and issues with sexuality formed.
Point of View
A narrative’s point of view is the way in which the story is narrated and describes who narrates the story. In the case of “Going to Meet the Man,” the point of view is a third-person limited point of view. This means that the narrator refers to its main character, Jesse, by his name and with pronouns, and also that the reader has access only to Jesse's thoughts, and none of other characters'. By making a white man with authority the story’s protagonist, Baldwin shows his readers how Jesse came to be a racist. By revealing Jesse's secret desires and fears, Baldwin depicts Jesse as a character with complexity. By having very little input from the story's black characters, Baldwin shows the lack of representation and respect black people in the Jim Crow South received from white people.
Bildungsroman
Typically, a bildungsroman refers to a narrative in which the author bases the entire plot of the narrative on the growth of the character; that is, the dynamism of the protagonist is also the main plot driver of the tale. One way to view Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is that of the anti-bildungsroman—a story that is built around the very lack of growth in Jesse as a character. While Jesse’s character is complex, he is also very much a static character, meaning, in this instance, that the childhood Jesse’s thoughts about black people and race relations inform who he is an adult, but he also doesn’t change these thoughts, and, as a result, never grows as a character.
Nonetheless, it’s Jesse’s racism and feelings of sexual inferiority that allow him to beat the black man in the jail cell, and it is again Jesse’s racism that puts into play the story’s climactic moment (having sex with Grace) and the story’s last, unfinished action (the arrival of someone at the house). Without Jesse’s static racism, the story has no narrative arc.
Related Titles
By James Baldwin
