The Blues I'm Playing | Style

Narrator
In many ways, the narrative voice of ‘‘The Blues I'm Playing’’ is not likely to strike the contemporary reader as radical. This third-person voice uses simple and clear prose, providing very direct exposition-explanation about the characters' backgrounds and feelings. Nonetheless, when Hughes was writing in the 1920s and 1930s, both his short fiction and his poetry challenged many readers' expectations. First, the language was too direct, in explicit opposition to the prevailing standards of the era. These had been greatly influenced by turn-of-the-century...

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