Who is the narrator of "Salvation"?
The narrator of “Salvation” is the author, Langston Hughes, who, as a grown man, reflects on an incident that happened when he was thirteen. Using first person, he immediately connects the event to his Auntie Reed and her desire that he be brought to Christ and have Jesus come into his life.
Hughes presents himself in the time both before and after the night that he was supposed to be saved, as a young lamb brought into the fold. The experience of "salvation" is transformative, but not in the way he expected. Both his aunt’s eager anticipation and his trust in her convinced him that a miraculous transformation would happen: “I believed her.” He narrates how he and another boy, Westley, went through the experience together. Westley impatiently went forward first to get saved, but Langston waited for true revelation: “And I kept waiting serenely for Jesus,...
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waiting, waiting—but he didn't come.”
He decides to go through the motions anyway, out of shame and to “save further trouble.” Later that night, at home, he finds himself crying—because “I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.”
In these respects, while Hughes presents a story he wants us to believe is true, its likelihood depends on his admitting that he lied about something important and lost any nascent faith he had—and thus casts doubt on his reliability as a narrator.
Who is the narrator of "Salvation" and when does the story occur?
"Salvation" is a chapter in The Big Sea, an autobiographical work Hughes published in 1940. The story is set around the year 1913.
The story's narrator is Langston Hughes, looking back at an event that occurred when he was twelve going on thirteen. It is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of the older Hughes looking back at a deeply disillusioning experience he had as a youth.
As a first-person narrator, Hughes uses the "I" voice in the story, which adds immediacy to an experience that was decades old by the time he wrote about it. He brings us with him into the church where he pretends, under social pressure, to have a salvation experience that, in reality, is a sham. He says he does so because people are expecting it, it is getting late, and he is uncomfortably aware that he is holding his fellow parishioners up by not having the correct response. To "save further trouble," he decides to lie and say that he has been saved.
The first-person narration puts us right into the scene with the young Langston. Through the narrator's senses we hear the "moans" and "shouts" and "lonely cries" of the other worshippers. We see the many people who kneel and pray for the narrator's salvation. We feel the church rock with "prayer and song." This makes it easy for us to understand the pressure Langston experienced and why he pretended to what was not true, even though he later feels ashamed of it.