Themes: All Themes
Themes: Racism
The novel deeply explores the theme of racism, showcasing the lengthy history of discrimination and abuse faced by black individuals. This prejudice continues even into the late 1970s. Many white characters, including Luke Will and Tee Jack, regularly use the offensive term "nigger" to address any black person. The Cajun Boutan family commits numerous atrocious acts against black people, which law enforcement either overlooks or accepts a skewed...
Themes: Attaining Manhood
After enduring years of humiliation and abuse, the older black men finally decide to stand up for themselves, recognizing their own manhood. They confront challenges bravely, choosing not to run away or hide.
Among these men, Mathu has consistently upheld his dignity and stood up to the white men. He has never shied away from confrontation, as evidenced by an incident Chimley remembers—a showdown between Mathu and Fix after Mathu refused to return...
(Read more)Themes: Growth
Growth, change, and time are the three great organizing themes of A Gathering of Old Men. The process of growth within the old men motivates the inner action that structures much of the novel. What the men have been is clear enough. They have felt the contempt of the white men. They have felt even more bitterly their own self-contempt.
These men, old as they are, can still grow. They have too little left to lose to live any longer as frightened...
(Read more)Themes: Social Change
The story takes place within a broader context of social change. Mapes is just close enough to the old stereotype of the southern lawman for his variations from that stereotype to stand out all the more clearly. A Louisiana sheriff of an earlier generation could never have brought himself to say “Mister” to a black man. Gil and his black teammate are reminders of changes that would have been unthinkable in the South just a few years before, and...
(Read more)Themes: Time
Growth and change may finally be seen as possibilities within time, and time is the novel’s third great theme. Gil speaks for the future: his personal future, the future of the South, and, one may suppose, the future of the nation. Yet his father’s words of rejection threaten to cut Gil off from his own past. Fix proves capable of emancipating himself from the destructive patterns of the past, yet his rejection of Gil gives voice to the pain of a...
(Read more)Themes: Meaning Beyond Themes
Discerning the meaning of the novel involves more than an enumeration of its themes. The generosity of spirit that informs the characterization, and the note of humor that often lends a richness of human texture to events that could easily be reduced to melodrama, are part of the novel’s meaning, as is its loving but clear-eyed depiction of the life of black men and women in the rural South, a topic that Gaines has made his special subject....
(Read more)Themes: Interrelatedness of Human Beings within a Community
A Gathering of Old Men is difficult to classify; although it begins with an unsolved murder, it is much more than a mystery, and although it comments on social injustice, it is also the coming-of-age story of a whole community. Like much of Gaines’s work, A Gathering of Old Menis concerned with the interrelatedness of human beings within a community, with the effects of bigotry and the historical fact of slavery on the relationships of people in...
(Read more)Themes: Social and Racial Divisions
In the Louisiana...
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township where the story takes place, there are three distinct groups. The white community contains a range of people, from Sheriff Mapes, who is in a position of power that he uses according to his own discriminatory lights, to Candy, who sees herself as benevolent protector of the blacks who live on and work her land, to Lou Dimes, who is an outside observer. The members of the Cajun community, who are viewed by other whites...
(Read more)Themes: Historical and Social Forces
The clear divisions of these disparate groups are the result of historical and social forces (including slavery, discrimination, and respect for property rights) and are kept strong by bigotry, racism, and class divisions. Times are changing, however, and the balance of power begins to shift. In the novel, when the old African American men stand firm for themselves, not only must Mapes move beyond his racist enforcement of the law, but also Candy...
(Read more)Themes: Maturity and Independence
In Gaines’s earlier The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman(1971), the title character, an elderly former slave, finally achieves her complete independence when she defies the white owner of the land on which she lives by walking past him to go to the protest in her town. Similarly, Charlie Biggs achieves his manhood by acknowledging his responsibility for the killing of Beau Bouton and refusing to run. At the same time, he refuses to be treated...
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