The Beautiful Struggle

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2008

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Knowledge and Consciousness

The “Knowledge” recurs as a term Coates uses for the alternative skills learned outside the institution: how to talk to girls, how to look cool, how to style one’s hair, how to play basketball with authority, how to fight and win. Big Bill excels as a student of the Knowledge, whereas Coates does not initially. The Knowledge is sometimes used to refer to another alternative form of knowledge: the black histories outside of the white Western canon. This type of Knowledge is what leads one into “Consciousness,” that is: the understanding of the necessity for the liberation of black people all over and the revolution of African Americans in a society that devalues them. This Consciousness can range in its strictness, with Coates’s father as the extreme example of Conscious Man: he expands his pro-blackness beliefs to be anti-religion, anti-nationalism, and anti-consumerism, meaning his children don’t eat meat or celebrate national holidays. Over time, Coates comes into his own version of Consciousness as he reads texts about the Black Panthers.

Mecca

Mecca is the term Coates uses throughout the book to refer to Howard University, an HBCU (Historically Black College or University) where his father works and where, as Coates portrays it, “Conscious” African Americans aspire to attend. He never refers to the university’s actual name, instead using Mecca as a term to create an in-group of readers fluent in the same cultural background. That is, African Americans reading the book are more likely to immediately understand what Coates refers to when he writes “Mecca.” The use of the holiest site in Islam also references the turn to Islam by many radical black activists in the mid-20th century, including Malcom X. Furthermore, Coates’s eventual attendance at Howard positions his upbringing as preparation for a holy pilgrimage, again depicting his life as an epic tale worthy of documentation.

Music: Rap and the Djembe

Music recurs throughout the book as a space for liberating joy for both Coates and his brother Big Bill. The boys become obsessed with rap music, with Big Bill even starting his own band called The West Side Kings. Coates writes his own raps, getting swallowed in the experience of rhythm and lyric uniting. They are attracted to rap music for the ways it reflects back their experiences growing up in a dangerous Baltimore neighborhood. Coates describes it as a scream, releasing some of the tension of growing up in a culture of violence, always on the defensive. Later, when Coates attends NationHouse, his introduction to the djembe represents a similarly liberating experience with music. The djembe is a communion with his African roots, and he gets swept up in the intensity of its rhythms and the “virility” (148) it represents for him as a teenage boy. Music threads throughout the book as a kind of recurring rhythm, literally the background music for Coates’s coming of age.