Langston Hughes Literary Devices

Most stories that put the spotlight on African Americans in the 1920s show them working together to build each other up against whites, especially as a family. But Soul Gone Home shows an ugly side of it. Langston Hughes takes a broken single parent home to shape a different type of reader response. He does this by using dialect, characterization, and imagery. Dialect plays an important part in drama. It sets up how readers are going to interpret the characters. Langston Hughes uses a type of dialect that says a lot about these two characters. From the moment they begin to converse, readers should sense that they do not have much education. When the son says “So you just lemme grow up in the street, and I aint had no manners nor morals neither”

Hughes takes full advantage of imagery to set up the setting, describe his characters, and to set up a reader’s response as well. The characters stay in a tenement home, which is not a dream home for anybody. Hughes uses imagery to describe what the living conditions of the characters are, which were unfavorable. Imagery plays a big part in describing his characters to his readers. Using imagery to describe the readers also shapes the reader response, because I creates an image of the character in the readers mind. For example, by the end of the play, the mother becomes careless. The text says “she goes to the broken mirror and begins t rouge ad powder her face. In the street the ambulance gong sounds fainter and fainter in the distance. The Mother takes down an old fur coat from a nail and puts it on. Before she leaves, she smooth sack the quilts on the cot from which the dead boy has been removed. She looks into the mirror again, and once more whiten s her face with powder. She dons a red hat” (Hughes page 537). As soon as the men take her son away, she stops crying and prepares herself for the night. Those lines painted a picture of a careless woman doing what she feels she needs to do to survive. Those lines also paint a different picture from what was presented in the beginning of the story, the readers finally get to see the real her that Hughes hid, the side the son had to grow up seeing that he hated so