Langston Hughes’s Persona

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“Kids do not lie.” Adults always teach their children to be honest. But sometime, the adults give their kids no choice. The kids lie to save themselves. Langston Hughes (1902- 1967) wrote “Salvation”, a story about himself when he was twelve, and was forced to come to Jesus. By using short sentences and simple sentence structure, the author catches readers’ attention right at the beginning, and diction in this story is also really affected to make us think of a twelve-year-old boy was surrounded by “great many old people” (para.4), and could not face himself after then, because he had lied to everybody in the church. The story starts by short sentences that really affect the reader’s interest: “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved. It happened like this” (para.1). Rhythm disruption in this essay arouses the readers’ curiosity to what was going on to the child. Langston continues the story with a thirty-five-word sentence. It describes the child had to go to his Auntie Reed’s church “every night for week” with much “preaching, singing, praying and shouting”(para.1), thus repeating the word “and” four times in the sentence make us feel that time in the church longer than forever. “My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on!” (para.2) Sentences and these exclamation marks help Hughes’s aunt’s point of view standing out, and persuaded him to believe in Jesus. Keeping on waiting and being scared by the adult, he had to save himself without seeing any god. “But I was really crying because I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, and I hadn’t seen Jesus and that now I didn’t believe there was a

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