Identify examples of figurative language in A Raisin in the Sun.

The dialogue in A Raisin in the Sun uses numerous figures of speech that are commonly found in everyday speech. Lorraine Hansberry incorporates this type of figurative language to make the characters seem to be real people. Metaphors are frequently employed. Ruth, for example, refers to Walter’s friends as “clowns” because of their loud behavior. To indicate that she would like a more comfortable life, she uses the metaphor of “Buckingham Palace” for a luxurious home she would prefer. Walter uses the metaphor of “choking to death” to describe his feelings of being held back in his life. When Mama talks to Ruth about Walter’s idea of the liquor store, she rejects the concept of selling liquor as immoral, saying “I don’t want that on my ledger.” Similes also appear in their speech. Mama combines one with an allusion and personification when she says that yesterday she had seen a cockroach “marching… like Napoleon.”

Ruth also uses hyperbole, extreme exaggeration, when she imitates Travis’s speech when he is annoyed with her: “I wouldn’t kiss that woman goodbye for nothing in this world….” Beneatha also uses hyperbole when talking about how her mother might use the insurance money: “I don’t care if she wants to buy… a rocket ship.” Also, in challenging her brother’s constant criticism, she asks if he wants her to quite school or “just drop dead.” When she learns that Ruth is pregnant, she asks where the new baby is going to sleep, “on the roof?”

Let's start with Mama's plant. This plant shows a great example of symbolism.

• Mama is completely devoted to this houseplant. As with her family, she provides constant care and nurture to the plant. As anyone who has tended to a plant knows, there are requirements and maintenance needed for growth. This small plant represents the bigger dreams she sees for her family, despite obstacles of racism, oppression, and poverty. She says that the plant "ain’t never had enough sunshine or nothing." Here the reader can see the relationship between the plant and her family. In what seems like futile conditions, there is a hope and encouragement. However, Mama is realistic, understanding that this simple houseplant is the closest she will get to having her garden. She leaves her apartment, houseplant in hand, in a final act of resilience in the face of her adversities. The reader can assume she will bring this plant to a new home to face new challenges, but the perseverance held within this symbol remains.

Lastly, let's focus on the title. A Raisin in the Sun, a metaphor derived from the Langston Hughes poem "Harlem."

• Hansberry's use of this metaphor is used to connect a broken dream to a dried up raisin, devoid and empty of what it once was. Whether it is Mama, Walter, Ruth, Beneatha, or Travis, the characters in this story are dreamers. These characters want something more, something better, something that is fulfilling. The poverty and oppression faced by these characters is a direct danger to these dreams. Hansberry's title forces the reader to immediately confront this danger, to see the impact of broken dreams and their potentially to demoralize and destroy those who hold hope when hope is already so difficult to grasp.

What literary devices are used in A Raisin in the Sun?

A portmanteau is a word made up of two separate words. Common examples include “armlet”, which is a combination of “arm” and “bracelet”, and “camcorder”, which combines “camera” and “recorder”.

In A Raisin in the Sun we are introduced to a portmanteau word that appears to be Hansberry's own creation: “slubborn”. This is a combination of “sloppy” and “stubborn” and is used by Ruth to describe her son Travis.

As someone without much in the way of formal education, Ruth appears not to realize that “slubborn” isn't actually a real word. And yet there's something about that word that neatly encapsulates Travis' whole personality. For here is a child who, as with many children, can be pretty stubborn when he wants to be. And, also like many children, he can be quite sloppy too. Put the two together and you have a “slubborn” young boy indeed.

To some extent, Ruth is rather jealous of her son, and it's not hard to see why. In the very first scene of the play, Travis manages to wheedle fifty cents out of his father despite the fact that Ruth emphatically told him that he wasn't getting a penny. Yet Travis' stubbornness paid off handsomely.

Even so, by calling him “slubborn”, his mother wants to remind him that, no matter how clever he thinks he is by getting what he wants, he still has serious character flaws. After all, stubbornness can sometimes be a virtue, but not sloppiness.

An additional literary device in the play is irony, such as in the case of Mr. Lindner's visit to the Youngers. This is an example of situational irony, as Mr. Lindner insults and ostracizes the Youngers on account of their race, going against the expectations he establishes by introducing himself as a member of the welcoming committee.

The play's title is also an allusion to the Langston Hughes poem, "Harlem," which discusses the nature of the deferred dreams of Black Americans. This allusion helps further illuminate the themes of the play.

Perhaps the dominant literay device is allusion, for the author uses as the title of her play a line from Langston Hughes' poem "A Dream Deferred." This poem, which I quote below, presents the central problem of the play, which concerns the frustration and possible violence that results when black people are at once promised the American Dream by virtue of being an American but denied that dream because they are black.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

One motif is the Younger apartment as the central setting of the family's unity. It is small with only one window and cramped. It's where the kids were raised. This is where the vital activity of the family occurs throughout the play where they struggle with all their conflicts. It's appropriate that at the end, Mama stays behind to take a last look at the apartment.

As far as symbolism goes, Mama's plant is the most obvious one, representing Mama's care and dream for her family. Her dedication to the plant shows Mama's hope that her dream for the family will come true. Just as the plant has struggled to survive, so has the family.

When Beneatha cuts her hair, she cuts it and dons an afro that represents her heritage. Her new hair symbolizes her beliefs of not conforming to white society's standards as she searches for her identity by looking at the past of her roots in Africa.

Foreshadowing is used at the end of Scene One when Ruth faints. She later confirms her pregnancy which causes the family members to react in different ways. Their reactions give us a look into how their struggles affect them, but mostly how having a baby, usually a happy event in most families, affects each one of them. Their reactions tell us something about each of the characters.

What are three dominant literary devices used in the play A Raisin in the Sun?

One of the primary literary devices used in Hainsberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is repetition. This is a “global” device in the sense that it cannot be isolated in its single instances but has to be discussed on a structural level in the text. Repetition is not, however, difficult to find in the play and the usefulness of the device, dramatically, should be quickly apparent.

Several scenarios are repeated in the play, none of them more important than the scenario where Lindner, representing the white home owners group, visits the Younger family home to offer to buy the new house from them before they move in. Linder’s first visit unites Walter and Beneatha for the first time in the play, leading them to take sides against the offensive offer.

The subsequent action of the play reignites the disharmony between Walter and Beneatha, creating a dilemma for Walter (who has lost his investment in the liquor store) and for Beneatha (who has received a proposal of marriage wherein she would be unable to pursue her dreams of becoming a doctor). When Lindner is invited back to the Younger house it is because Walter intends to accept the buy-out and “sell-out” his pride.

The challenge of denying Lindner in the second iteration of this scenario is greater than the first. The plot complications preceding this repetition of the scene have raised the importance of the choice that the family faces. Additionally, Mama directly articulates the meaning of Walter’s decision, telling her son that accepting the money would be a rejection of the family’s proud history and moral identity.

Mama: Son – I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth.

Again, Walter denies Lindner’s offer, speaking to the idea that his family’s pride is at stake (and, by extension, their moral identity and their value as people). Dramatically, the repetition of this scenario allows for a “raising of the stakes” while also giving form to the action of the play. 

Also, the repetition of this scenario allows the play to pose a very loaded question to its characters twice (under different circumstances the second time). If Walter can say no to Lindner once when things are looking up, can he also say no when things have fallen apart around him?  Only by repeating the episode can a question like this be posed.

Repetition is also used Beneatha’s scenes with her suitors. Each of them enters the house and is met by Mama, allowing for conversations that contrast the modes of identity/modes of being these men represent.

Additionally, as Iprono points out, symbolism is used as a literary device in the play. Mama’s plant is a great example of an object that represents an idea (or set of ideas). Mama nurtures the plant as she nurtures her own sense of hope and belief that the future can be better than the recent past.

The plant’s meaning is clear within the play, making the symbolism pointed and reinforcing the ethos of Mama’s character (which is related to the idea that trust, faith and hope are internally oriented qualities, dependent on self-determination and not outside forces).

Other symbols are used in the play as well, albeit not with such metaphorical force. The iconography of African music and style participates in A Raisin in the Sun as part of the play’s treatment of the concept(s) of African American identity. Beneatha’s choice to wear her hair in an afro for a while is commented upon by her brother in a way that shows how complex the identity issue at the heart of the play is.

Where Beneatha sees the style as a means achieve self-assertion and as a way to refuse to compromise to Western aesthetics (and values), Walter engages with the African music wildly and even madly. 

Walter: (On the table, very far gone, his eyes pure glass sheets. He sees what we cannot, that he is a leader of his people, a great chief, a descendent of Chaka, and that the hour to march has come.)

This difference of perspective and relationship to the concept of African culture indicates the superficial differences between Walter and Beneatha while also suggesting the complexity of their situation vis a vis identity.

There is no obvious way for either of them to enact a sensible self-assertion, pan-African or otherwise, within the culture they live in. Only compromises are available and the style of dress and music in this scene symbolizes Beneatha’s need for outward-looking cultural references and also symbolizes Walter's deep desire to be something other than a servant. 

The title itself is metaphorical and allusive. It refers to Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" in which the poet asked whether a dream that is continuously put off, like the dreams of the characters in the play, dries up "like a raisin in the sun" or explodes. The title is metaphorical as it uses a tangible object (raisin) to refer to a less concrete entity (the characters' dreams). It is allusive because it refers to another text which readers should recall to get the complete meaning it wishes to convey.

The play offers an example of the technique of foreshadowing, the contrary of a flashback as it anticipates something that will be confirmed later at the end of scene one. Ruth faints and this scene foreshadows her later annoucement that she's pregnant. Pregnancy and fainting have long been associated in theatrical conventions.

Similar to a metaphor, a symbol is a concrete object that, in addition to its material nature, expresses an idea or a concept. In the play, the ugly plant that Mama plans to take to the new house is symbolic  of her family's endurance in the face of negative and disadvantaged circumstances.

What literary devices are used in "A Raisin in the Sun" and "Harlem"?

Lorraine Hansberry uses Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" as an epigraph to her play "A Raisin in the Sun."  An epigraph is when an author chooses to place a quote or poem, etc. by another author that serves to introduce a theme in the work.  For instance, "Harlem" is filled with metaphors and similes about what happens to a dream deferred (at one point, the speaker asks if it dries up like a raisin in the sun).  Hansberry, therefore, uses an allusion to Hughes' poem as her title, and also adopts the theme of the poem as the theme of her play.

What are three aspects of society depicted in A Raisin in the Sun using literary and dramatic devices?

Lorraine Hansberry depicts numerous aspects of American society in the 1950s. The Youngers faces numerous challenges as an African American family of the times, and individual characters grapple with specific problems. Walter is an employee who dreams of owning his own business but has no start-up capital. Lena and her hard-working husband had long dreamed of owning a home. When she is finally able to do so, the family encounters racist opposition. Beneatha desires to become a physician, but first she must finish her undergraduate studies; the family’s resources are strained by paying her tuition. Hansberry often employs the literary devices of metaphor and simile in the characters’ expressions of their attitudes, as well as the device of allusion. Throughout the play these attitudes are conveyed through the dramatic devices of characterization and dialogue.

Walter is dissatisfied with his chauffeur job. He discusses with his wife, Ruth, his hope that his mother will agree to using part of her late husband’s life insurance policy to help him establish his own business. With his friends as partners, he wants to open a liquor store. Walter does not have capital for the initial investment. In dialogue with Ruth, Walter expresses his frustrated desire to achieve his dream with the metaphor,

“I got to change my life, I’m choking to death, baby!”

She responds with a sarcastic allusion to her supposed dream of being the Queen of England through her mention of living in Buckingham Palace.

Lena and her husband, Walter Sr., had dreamed of buying a house but could not afford to do so. Lena expresses her husband’s lifelong hard work with the simile, “working and working and working like somebody’s old horse.” In the period in which the play is set, Walter Jr. and his wife, Ruth, contribute to paying the rent on a small apartment. Even their pooled resources are insufficient for a down payment on a house. When Lena locates an affordable home, the Youngers face racist opposition to their becoming the first family to integrate the all-white neighborhood where it is located. The character of Karl Lindner, who is the embodiment of this opposition, claims that “racial prejudice” is not a factor in the community members’ attitude.

Beneatha, after exploring various interests, has decided to become a physician. In the 1950s, only a tiny percentage of physicians were African-American women. She faces dual obstacles to achieving her goal. In the shorter term, she must maintain high grades in her pre-medical track, which includes the difficult biology course in which she is enrolled during the play; she sarcastically refers to the course as “lovely.” Her brother suggests that she become a nurse instead and complains about the drain on the family resource her tuition represents. Dialogue between Beneatha and Walter reveals his concerns.

Walter: … You such a nice girl—but if Mama got that money she can always take a few thousand and help you through school too—can’t she?
Beneatha: I have never asked anyone around here to do anything for me!