Long Way Down By Jason Reynolds

William Mann
Amanda Holida
C period
06 April 2023

Bombarding forces impact our daily lives everyday and it is often our choice as to how we will handle these obstacles. Last week my literature group and I finished the novel Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. This is a story that takes place all in a minute time period in an elevator ride where the main character Will is facing the forces of his past. He experiences certain family members as well as friends enter the elevator as ghosts where they give him advice on his big decision. Will has to decide by the end of the novel will he get revenge for his brothers death or Will he go against the rules of the street and live his life. Reynolds uses literary techniques such as imagery, tone, and

Reynolds used this literary technique to tell me what the decision process was like for Will in the elevator. When Will is almost half way down the elevator ride Dani, a ghost from the past, has begun lighting cigarettes with buck and the smoke starts to cloud up the box. Suddenly two hands jump at him and Will describes them as, “The largest I’d ever seen, / rushed through the cloud / hard and fast, / snatching fistfuls of my shirt, / yoking me by the neck”(Jason Reynolds 153). These hands turned out to be Will's father entering the elevator as a ghost. The description of the hands and their swift movements help me picture his father jumping at him in an intense fashion. Reynolds uses imagery to describe another person that enters the elevator but has a much different impact on Will than his dad did. For instance the door of the elevator opened, “A stranger, / chubby, / light skin, / almost white…”(Reynolds 237). In this part of the novel a man Frick walks in the elevator but this is a difficult situation for Will because he killed his brother's model Buck. Frick entering the elevator develops a new perspective for Will on how people have influenced him. Frick killed Buck and the way Reynolds uses imagery to depict him shows he is not a family

A moment when the tone changes is near the beginning when Dani, Will’s childhood friend enters the elevator. Will rethinks what it was like when she died and says, “No crying, / feeling like / I wanted to scratch / my skin off scratch / my eyes out punch / through something/ …” (Reynolds 136). The sorrowful yet uneasy tone in this quote from Will emphasizes how sad death is, and for Will it influences his decision for whether to kill Riggs or not. Not only is it sorrowful it sounds painful as the scratching of skin and eyes are gruesome actions. Although Will holds back from crying after Dani’s death when Shawn enters the elevator a whole new set of emotions are running through his head. Will asks him if he should kill riggs or not and when Shawn doesn’t answer him he, “Breaks down / The tears were coming / and he did what he could / to hold them back” (Reynolds 297). The number one rule on Will’s street is no crying taught to him by his brother. When Shawn enters the elevator he spreads an anxious and uncertain tone throughout the elevator and into Will. The anxious tone is created when Shawn won’t respond to Will’s questions. This tone resets Will, into having a lost mindset of what he will do once he steps out of the