Why Can the Caged Bird Not Sing?

Brannigan, Kyla

Mrs. Smith

AP Language Arts

20 January 2017

Why Can the Caged Bird Not Sing?

Francine Prose, in her article I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read, presents the idea that promoting life values by teaching literature pieces through forcing high school and college students to analyze them, sentence-by-sentence, on the hunt for metaphors and similes and analogies, is the only way for them to understand what the author’s meaning in writing those passages was. However, the meaningful themes that fill history’s most acclaimed novels often go unnoticed by students who are preoccupied with sentence structure and different clauses.

When students are made to dissect the words of an author for the possible deeper-meanings they may hold, the students rapidly lose sight of the piece of literature as being a composition; an author’s work cannot be adequately appreciated if sections of his or her work are taken apart and made separate from the others. In light of the campaign and now inauguration of Donald J. Trump as our president, the “art” of taking words out of context and shredding them until there is little to no context left has finally been illuminated. People on both sides have misconstrued the words of their political opponents and candidates have been represented by one-liners that caught the media’s attention. The past year has been a prime example of how, when people’s words are taken out of context and are dissected to the very infrastructure of their composition, the bigger picture is decomposed into miniscule pixels that do not accurately represent the whole. In both daily life and the realm of fictional literature, the words of our icons, whether they be real or fictional, are only impactful when viewed as a whole.

        Among centuries of novels written by thousands of remarkable authors, teachers have been teaching their students priceless life lessons through works of fiction. By teaching children To Kill A Mockingbird, you are exposing them to, as Prose wrote, “[the] thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would never harbor the racist attitudes espoused by the lowlifes in the novel.” On the other hand, when you teach students to pick apart Harper Lee’s sentences to find nuances such as syntax, diction, and prose, you are exposing them to much less of the important values and more to the specifics of grammar and convention. For example, Atticus explained to the court that “She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man.” If you take this excerpt as it is at face value, you can see the racism in how Atticus’s society was ingrained to think that a white woman kissing a black man was inherently wrong. However, if you are assigned to find what Atticus Finch meant when he called that action “unspeakable”, you miss the racism in turn for understanding the latent meaning in Finch’s words. If teachers continue to teach works of fiction for their grammatical aspects, as Francine Prose suggests, then students will remain oblivious to the inherent life lessons in many of the books they are required to read in school.