Essay on
a Lesson Before Dying
A Lesson before Dying
is with reference to the ways in which people assert on declaring the value of
their lives in a time and place in which those lives count for nothing. It is
connected with the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the
moment of their death. As such, Gaines’s novel surpass its minutely evoked state
of affairs to lecture the fundamental dilemma of what it is to be a human being,
a creature attempting for dignity in a universe that often negates it.
A Lesson before Dying set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s
brings to life the story of two men as they fight to come to terms with their
singular, yet associated future. In this brilliantly written heart-rending novel
Ernest J. Gaines illustrates a deep understanding of the human mind and a
feeling for people and their battle against a heartless society.
A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery effort. Jefferson, a young black
man, is in jail awaiting execution for the killing he did not commit. A country
schoolmaster, Grant Wiggins, realizes that the decision and the punishment were
inevitable for any African-American. In like manner, Wiggins finds that he is
also deprived of freedom. Grant Wiggins visits the sullen Jefferson, who
claims to be a hog, just being fattened up for the slaying. Consequently Wiggins
initiates the painful odyssey that will end with Jefferson’s execution and to
educate Jefferson, to reach him so that he will go to the chair a man and not a
hog. Jefferson’s discriminatory conviction and the numerous attempts to help him
die with human dignity constitute the essential plot structure of the novel.
The reason being that at his trial, Jefferson hears his own lawyer debate that
he should be acquitted because is nothing more than a fool and a hog, and
naturally incapable to carry out a complex robbery and manslaughter.
The lawyer’s words appall and anger him even more than the death sentence
itself. He becomes a bitter and hostile man, refusing to act like a human being
any longer, taking on the attitude that his life means nothing more than the
life of a hog.
Grant communicates some of his own ethics to Jefferson. He educates Jefferson to
have self-respect in himself and to use that self-respect as a blunt weapon to
save not only himself, but also others in the community.
By the end of the novel, Jefferson grasp just how significant his life is to the
black community. He goes to his death with nobility, and successfully defies the
world that tried to keep him down all his life. A Lesson before Dying delves
into the lost self-respect and the often-disconcerting links between the
individual and the encompassing community.
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