Discussion Topic

"Salvation" Story Hook and Title Significance

Summary:

Langston Hughes's story "Salvation" explores a young boy's quest for spiritual salvation, reflecting on his experience at a religious revival where he feels pressured to claim he has seen the light of Jesus. The title signifies both the boy's literal search for salvation and the broader spiritual journey he embarks upon. The story's hook lies in its opening lines, which present a contradiction—being "saved from sin, but not really saved"—prompting readers to explore the complexities of faith and truth.

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Why is the story titled "Salvation"?

As the answer to this question would depend on your own opinion, I can suggest some points in the narrative that could guide your decision.

The term “salvation” actually only occurs in the title. Throughout the essay, however, Langston uses the word “save” or the variant "saved" ten times, until about two-thirds of the way through. Its last use comes after his Auntie Reed implores him to come up, and he is too ashamed to sit waiting any longer: “So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved.”

In the very first line, he sets up a difficult situation: he was “saved from sin . . . But not really saved.” He tells the reader what his aunt said about being saved and what happened in the church as the other “sinners” were...

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being saved. It seems that he wants us to think that he remained a sinner, but in the last quarter of the essay, he stops discussing sin and being saved. At the very end, he talks about deceit and lies. The question of what Hughes understood as "salvation" remains open—and to me, that is what makes it intriguing.

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I think that the story is titled "Salvation" because at the story's core it is about a boy's search and desire to find salvation.  The narrator of the story is retelling an event that happened when he was 12 years old.  That's a young and impressionable age.  It's also still a young enough age where a lot of words and sayings are taken literally.  

The narrator's Aunt Reed had been attending a religious revival all week, and she wanted to take the narrator to the last day.  Aunt Reed told him that he would know Jesus had come into his heart and saved him when he saw a bright light.  The narrator was the only child left and felt pressured into acting like he saw the light of Jesus.  To everyone that was attending the revival, he was saved.  He got his salvation.  In that regard the title makes sense.  

Even had the narrator not faked his bright light vision, I think the title still makes sense.  The narrator is not anti-God.  As that 12 year old boy, he's not even a skeptic.  He wants to see the light and feel Christ's salvation.  He's searching.  And it shows a lot of strength of character that he holds out for so long against faking it. Many Christians talk about their spiritual journey and how their faith has matured over many years.  Simply because the narrator didn't "see the light" that day doesn't mean he won't ever.  That day ended with him thinking more about God and God's plan.  That's a step in a long spiritual journey.  Whether it ends with salvation or not is not told in the story, but the title still fits well.  

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What is the hook in the story "Salvation"?

A narrative hook is a literary device used at the beginning of a story to capture a reader’s attention. It is often an intentionally ambiguous but attention-grabbing sentence (or set of sentences) that aim to immediately engage the reader.

In Langston Hughes's short story “Salvation,” the hook is the contradiction in the first two lines:

I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved. It happened like this.

This is the hook because it suggests that the following story is going to be complex and significant. Consider the gravity of the statement “I was saved from sin.” This is a powerful claim to make and it likely makes a lot of readers interested in what happened right from the start.

The following detail makes the story even more intriguing, as the narrator says that he was “saved” when he was just twelve-years-old. The concept of being “saved from sin” is a serious one for religious people, and it is often assumed that it is an idea children cannot quite grasp. The notion that a boy as young as twelve was saved thus sets the stage for a unique story.

But then the narrator contradicts himself a bit by saying he was “not really saved.” All of a sudden the reader is confused. The reader might be asking “Well, what does he mean by saved then? How can one be saved from sin but also not?” The only way to find the answers to these questions is to read on, meaning that Hughes has successfully hooked the reader in.

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