Another Country Essay Questions

How does Baldwin depict the city?

Baldwin's view of New York City in the 1950s is not particularly positive. Nearly all characters, regardless of their race, sexual orientation, or gender, find it, at times, frightening, stifling, lonely, and/or harsh. The Black characters suffer from the effects of white supremacy, and the queer characters do not always find their true selves accepted. Critic Laura Fisher writes, "Baldwin’s postindustrial New York is more like a funhouse mirror reflecting back to his characters their hopes, desires, and pain in nightmarish distortion. His descriptions of city crowds are often negative: noisy, faceless revelers packing bars, citizens competing for space on streets and subways and parks, the 'aimless mob' always threatening to swallow up individual subjectivity."

Why does one critic claim Eric is "the key to this novel"?

Barry Gross suggests "Eric is the key to this novel: he is the link between Vivaldo and Rufus and, consequently, between Vivaldo and Ida. He is the common denominator, as in the film 'his face operated, in effect, as a footnote to the twentieth-century torment'... He can be this because he had dragged his secrets into the light of the world." Eric has sex with Cass and Rufus and Vivaldo, yes, but the connection is more than that—he is willing to do the work he needs to do to understand himself, what it means to be a white person in a white supremacist society, and how to chart a path forward through sorrow and suffering. He shows the other what they need to do to achieve a similar type of self-awareness.

What does Baldwin suggest by titling Book Three "Towards Bethlehem"?

The title comes from W.B. Yeats's 1920 poem "The Second Coming," a nightmarish and apocalyptic vision of the 20th century that ends with the line "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" This familiar allusion allows Baldwin to strike an ominous note, a note of menace even as he has his characters (mostly) seem to achieve some degree of equanimity and peace.

How does Baldwin depict Harlem?

We mostly see this depiction through a few spare flashbacks of Rufus and Ida's life, which seems characterized by familial closeness and stability, but also through their comments about the neighborhood as they perceive it from their position as adults. Ida in particular sees it as a place from which she has to escape, a place that, if she was not careful, would suck her into poverty or prostitution like so many other Black girls. Ida states that white people keep Black people trapped up there, unable to do much about their deleterious living conditions because white supremacy is too powerful. The neighborhood festers with rage, she intimates, and is a dead end—which is why Rufus tried to get out, though he found many of the problems of Harlem manifested for Black people in the rest of the city as well.

Though the novel takes place in the North, what evocations are there of the South?

In his article on this topic, Keith Mitchell explains how Rufus's navigation of being Black in New York is not so different from what navigating the Jim Crow South would be like. There are policemen constantly surveilling him, ready to jump if he steps even one toe out of line; regular people, like those in the park, also police him. When he is thought to be acting inappropriately towards Jane, a white woman, he and Vivaldo are attacked. And as for Leona, "in truth, the fact that Leona is not only white but also Southern intensifies Rufus' interest in her. She becomes both a means for his taunting the white world in general and more specifically revenge for the myriad humiliations and psychological trauma he endured from white Navy officers during his time in the South." Finally, Mitchell posits that even Rufus's suicide by drowning might be connected to the Middle Passage. All of these allusions to the South remind the reader that the North was no real haven for Black people, even if it wasn't the nexus of Jim Crow.