The Liar (poem) Literary Elements

In "The Liar," the speaker is characterized as someone who is very vocal about his life: "Though I am a man / who is loud / on the birth / of his ways," (lines 12-5). He is concerned about his relationship to the public and how they keep him from knowing himself. This person is at once set apart and intrinsically tied to the masses; it is this push-pull effect that keeps him from realizing his true self. The speaker also experiences an alienation from everything that was once in his heart—"the tree's shadow / winding around the chair" and "a distant music / of frozen birds rattling / in the cold,"—produce nothing but fear in him (lines 3-6). "The Liar" acts as a window into the emotionally wrought psychological landscape of this speaker as he re-examines the world around himself.

Although it is dangerous in poetry to assume that the speaker is the same as the poet of a poem, there is a case for believing that speaker in "The Liar" is Amiri Baraka himself. The poem concerns a very public transformation of self, a transformation that Baraka himself underwent just a few years after publishing this poem. Additionally, Baraka includes his own nickname in the final stanza, indicating that the speaker also shares a name with the author. When reading this poem, we can find it useful to see the speaker as being both a literal representation of Baraka and another entity that is going through a similar transformation as he is. This way, we can make inferences about the overall themes and messages of the poem without placing too much pressure for literal understanding on the poem itself.

"The Liar" does not conform to an established form or meter, but there are moments of musicality throughout the piece.

Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds within a phrase. The final stanza contains a moment of beautiful alliteration: "When they say, 'It is Roi / who is dead.' I wonder / who will they mean?" The repetition of the "w" sounds emphasizes the final question and ends the poem on an oomf.

Irony in literature implies distance between what is said and what is meant. The fact that the speaker could be understood as Baraka himself creates a bit of irony in this poem. In a sense, Baraka satirizes himself and the power of his poetry to make claims about himself: "though I am a man / who is loud / on the birth / of his ways." Additionally, the poem itself could constitute Baraka's act of "publicly redefining" himself during his transition from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka. Thus, these lines have both a literal and figurative meaning, depending on whether or not you choose to equate Baraka with the speaker.

Poetry

ominous, unsettling; serious and self-reflective

There are two major conflicts at work in this poem: Man vs. Society and Man vs. Self. The speaker opposes himself to the public, who do not understand the effects of his metamorphosis and do not recognize him once it has been completed. The speaker also battles with himself in this poem, since he cannot understand his previous "comforts" and his own emotional impulses. The title of the poem, "The Liar," adds a deeper dimension to the speaker's conflict with himself. By making that the title of his poem, the speaker is suggesting that he himself is a "liar," which puts the rest of his testimony into question.

"The Liar" leads up to the climax by speeding up the rhythm at the beginning of Stanza III: "Though I am a man / who is loud / on the birth / of his ways." The speed of these lines evokes the climax of the poem, which juts out diagonally across the page: "and profited, biblically, even though / their chanting weight / erased familiarity / from my face." These lines constitute the climax of the poem because they highlight the bittersweet nature of the speaker's metamorphosis, which brings obvious gain but also fundamentally changes the speaker.

In "The Liar," the speaker foreshadows both the completion of his metamorphosis and his own death. Because the final stanza is in the future tense, he is predicting a destined event in which the public says "It is Roi / who is dead." This event could follow his literal death, when the public was given the task of determining the legacy of both his pre- and post- metamorphosis selves (LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka). The public could also be saying this as a result of the realization of his metamorphosis, which would cause his previous self to be unrecognizable and essentially dead.

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which the name of one object or concept is substituted for another to which it is related. In the final stanza, "Roi" represents metonymy because it is a nickname that denotes a whole (Le Roi Jones/the speaker's past self).

Onomatopeia is when a word is created to sound like the noise it invokes. An example of onomatopoeia in "The Liar" is "rattling" from Stanza I. The compression of the hard-consonant sounds in this word create a clattering effect when the word is read allowed, particularly around the "t" sound in the middle of the word.