Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminally Insane By Etheridge Knight

Although prisons have the primary objective of rehabilitation, prisoners will likely go through many other troubling emotions before reaching a point of reformation. Being ostracized from society, it is not uncommon to experience despair, depression, and hopelessness. Be that as it may, through reading various prison writings, it can be seen that inmates can find hope in the smallest things. As represented in “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane”, the author, Etheridge Knight, as well as other black inmates look up to Hard Rock, an inmate who is all but dutiful in a world where white people are placed at the top of the totem pole. However, after Hard Rock goes through a lobotomy-esque procedure, the motif

Living up to his name, Hard Rock is shown to have a hard demeanor and appearance. “Split purple lips, lumped ears, welts above/ His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut/ Across his temple and plowed through a thick/ Canopy of kinky hair” (lines 3-6). Knight presents Hard Rock as someone who has been abused often through the numerous thick scars on his face, as well as adding that he was “known not to take no shit” (line 1) to add to the imagery of Hard Rock having a tenacious

More of Knight’s notable use of diction and tone is found in this stanza, where he writes, “A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch/ And didn’t lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock/ From before shook him down and barked in his face./ And Hard Rock did nothing” (lines 24-27). It can be felt from Knight’s use of tone that this type of action is uncharacteristic of Hard Rock. The second stanza details Hard Rock’s lobotomy, with Knight writing, “...the doctors had bored a hole in his head,/ Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity/ Through the rest” (lines 8-10). This leaves the inmate with an intruding presence of hopelessness. The imagery and diction is the last stanza of the poem drives home the motif of disheartenment that the black prison inmates felt after realizing that Hard Rock is forever changed. Similar to the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, the central, nonconformist character Randle McMurphy, who gave the inmates a sense of hope, is lobotomized, leaving the prisoners afraid and unable to challenge authority in the way they could have if McMurphy was still his full, original self. This is the same way that Etheridge Knight and his fellow prisoners felt after Hard Rock’s return. The one person who was brave enough to stand back was now made into a martyr for the prisoners as well as an example made for the prisoners on what would happen if