James Baldwin's Views On Notes Of A Native Son

Memos on “Notes of a Native Son”

James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” tactfully touches on the subject of racial and cultural unrest in the United States in the 1950s. It recounts the story of James Baldwin, and his battle of tolerance and stereotypes. Throughout the work, Baldwin manages to convey societal issues through an autobiography as he shares stories from his upbringing and youth. He marks the events that would shackle him to the makeup of his race, rather than the makeup of a man. Baldwin's essay “Notes of a Native Song” demonstrates the issues of race in the 1950s by relating the moral disregard of the country to his own experiences throughout his life. Baldwin emphasizes the strained relationship between himself, his father, and other characters by using his experience as a reference to further understand the rift in ideology. He asserts this topic with his analysis of not only the relationships between races, but how concepts and behaviors reflect on man.

“Notes of a Native Son” opens with the funeral of James Baldwin’s

“Notes of a Native Son” is not only a touching essay, it is also a statement that was needed in the 1950s era. His youth is described in omnicolor, describing both the most grim and vibrant events of his life. His strained relationship with his father adding a personal, catalyst to both his and his father’s ire contributes to the reader’s understanding of Baldwin’s resistance to the mundane, tortuous path that lay before him, had he not fought against that future religiously. Baldwin’s conception of man through an analysis of not only himself, but the people surrounding him, leaves a question to be answered in the sternum of every American, a question both created and answered by