The Dark Child | The Dark Child

At a glance:

Author: Camara Laye
First Published: 1953
Type of Work: Autobiographical Bildungsroman
Time of Work: The mid-1930’s to the mid-1940’s
Setting: Kouroussa, a village in French Guinea, and Conakry, the capital of Guinea
Principal Characters: The Narrator, His Father, His Mother
Genres: Long fiction, Bildungsroman, Autobiographical fiction
Subjects: Africa or Africans, Education or educators, 1940’s, Villages, 1930’s, Rites or ceremonies
Locales: French Guinea, Guinea

The Dark Child tells the story of the author’s youth. Yet, the style, structure, and purpose of the book cause it to be classified as a novel as well as an autobiography; Camara Laye has molded his materials in such a way that it is not he, himself, who emerges from the book but rather a representative man. In this way, The Dark Child is similar to other “shaped” autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), and even D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and...

The Dark Child | The Dark Child

At a glance:

The Novel

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