Chesnutt

I don't know about the rest of you, but I had a very difficult time reading the two Chesnutt pieces for today's class. The dialogue of the black characters was hard to read for comprehension. I found myself focusing on what words they were speaking instead of what they were actually saying. When I have read this before, like in Huck Finn for example, the dialogue is around text with proper grammar. In these stories, the black character was telling a story, so it was nothing but dialogue. No other characters talking for the most part, and no narrator to frame the story while it was being told. Huck Finn has a narrator that I can understand that is telling the actually story. The actual stories being told in Chestnutt were ones I had to pick out. Eventually I got pretty much what the story was, but the effect of a good story is lost when I have to struggle to know the story. Not only did I find the dialogue hard to read, but it was offensive, though I understand that these were written in very different times. I do get offended at times when reading dialogue like this from minority characters, but I have to imagine that the author is only trying to capture what that person sounded like and blacks at the time were uneducated so it may not be far from the truth. In the end I didn't enjoy these pieces because it was such a struggle to simply read them.