Conflicts In A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J, Gaines is a Louisiana native, born on a plantation, in a slave area. Being from the rural south, he typically writes his novel relating to the south, poverty, and African Americans and the challenges they have faced. The novel takes place in the 1940s, a time where blacks were typically hated by whites. The novel was accepted and loved by the critics in 1993 when the book was published. Stated in The New York Times newspaper, “A Lesson before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines's novel about black life in Louisiana before the civil-rights era, won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction yesterday” (New York Times). This specific Ernest Gaines novel, A Lesson before Dying, has many themes, external conflicts, and internal conflicts. In A Lesson before Dying many characters face several struggles that he or she eventually

She is the Godmother of Jefferson and best friend to Grant’s aunt, Tante Lou. Miss Emma takes care of Jefferson. She feels as though it is her fault Jefferson is incarcerated. She feels this way because Jefferson has made her feel guilty. Grant states in, A Lesson before Dying, “… He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty…” (Gaines 123). One of the Obstacles she faces is that she wants Jefferson to stand and walk as a man. In Novels for Students it states, “More importantly, she wants him to understand that he is a man and not the ‘hog’ the court says he is” (NFS 162). Miss Emma states, “‘I don’t want them to kill no hog,’ she said. ‘I want a man to go to that chair, on his own two feet’” (Gaines 13). The overcoming of this is making Grant Wiggins help him to become a man. In the novel the sheriff, Paul, says, “He was the strongest man in the room… When Vincent asked him if he had any last words, he looked at the preacher and said, ‘Tell Nannan I walked.’ And straight he walked…” (Gaines 254). Miss Emma was not the only person who conquered her