43 pages • 1 hour read
James BaldwinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In the first essay of Notes of a Native Son, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin introduces the theme of comforting falsehoods. In writing about how the protest novel relies upon formulaic representations of humanity that disavow more complex realities, he suggests that “the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power” (29). In philosophical traditions, ethics is often understood as referring to how one relates with reality. Relations that seek to evade reality are unethical. Misrepresenting reality, by presenting it as we wish it were rather than as it actually is, is one of the more common ways of being unethical. Such moves of evasion can be reduced to questions of truth, honesty, and fear.
Steeped in the Christian prophetic tradition as he was, Baldwin frequently spoke and wrote about the “terrible power” of lies (29). When we flee a discomforting reality in favor of a more comforting falsehood, Baldwin suggests we are diminished and end up perishing. The darkness of ambiguity, paradox, hunger, and danger, however, is where “we can find ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves” (29).
By James Baldwin
A Black Lives Matter Reading List
View Collection
Black Arts Movement
View Collection
Contemporary Books on Social Justice
View Collection
Essays & Speeches
View Collection
Existentialism
View Collection
Hate & Anger
View Collection
Inspiring Biographies
View Collection
Memoir
View Collection
Politics & Government
View Collection
Sociology
View Collection