Men We Reaped Literary Elements

Memoir / Biography

Set in the towns of DeLisle and Pass Christian in Mississippi Gulf Coast during the 2000s.

First-person narration from the perspective of Jesmyn Ward.

Somber, Frustrated, Brooding, Heartbroken

The protagonist is the author Jesmyn Ward while the antagonist is the tragic fates that befell the five men in her family.

Ward reflects on the tragic fates of the five young men in her family each from different circumstances yet bred from poverty and racial dynamics.

The memoir perhaps reaches its climax with the death of Ward’s brother in a drunk driving accident but their family does not get the justice and compensation they deserve.

“We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.”

Ward foreshadows the inescapable aspects of their community that drive many especially young black men to their deaths.

“After several years of marriage, my grandfather Adam divorced my grandmother to marry her friend. So my mother learned to cook before she turned ten”

Ward alludes to the societal issues that take young men to an early grave such as addiction, poverty, depression, and suicide. She addresses these problems that creep into the lives of young people but they never assess the damage until it is too late.

“The night swooped down in great black swaths, and the streetlights, spaced far apart, shone weakly. Insects swarmed in foggy clouds around the bulbs, dimming them even further so we were dusky shadows, and the stars dozed on the dome of the sky like larger, distant insects.”

The book explores the paradox of theodicy as Ward believes and vindicates God’s plan yet she has suffered unfathomable and tragic losses in her family.

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“He was already swallowed by the black reach of the highway.”

“The wind from the Gulf stuttered in, blew sand lazily across the parking lot, across my feet.”