Answer:
Look for an example of a simile or metaphor within chapters 7-9 of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Write the example in the space below, indicating the chapter it is from and what is being compared. What does this simile or metaphor do in the text? In other words, how does it help the reader?
A reader who has not been told that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a novel can be forgiven for not knowing how to classify it. When it was first published, anonymously, in 1912, the book included a preface from the publisher, written almost exactly as Johnson proposed, that described it as a “new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States” (p. xxxiii). The preface suggests that what follows is a sociological study. But in the novel’s first paragraph, the unnamed narrator tells us that he is “divulging the great secret” of his life, moved by “the same impulse which forces the un-found-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence” (p. 1). This beginning prepares us for a confessional narrative such as those by St. Augustine or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Exemplifying the capacity of novels to absorb other genres, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a sociological study in terms of its analysis of the dynamics of race, class, and geography, and a confessional narrative, albeit a fictional one. But it is as a novel that Johnson’s book engages us most urgently, in that the story of its narrator’s life is ultimately a plea for the reader’s understanding.
