Blog Post #4: "The Known World" Prose Essay- A Reflection

“When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness . . . all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange . . .” In the novel The Known World by Edward P. Jones, the author records the evening of a slave names Moses and through his description, reveals his inner character. Utilizing an omniscient third person point of view, specific details, and natural imagery, Jones creates the identity of someone whose sense of being is tied to the earth that he works on.

The first detail the readers learn about Moses is that “he worked . . . well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them . . .” Moses is portrayed as a lone soul who is not necessarily lonely; details such as his own wife and “his son among them” leaving the field ahead of him accentuates his solitude. The third person narrator furthers this effect of distance, the audience having to meet Moses from afar rather than an up-close first person account. Along with the continual reminder of his solitude are vivid descriptions of his surroundings, of nature. The sunset is described as “a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon.” These create the world of which Moses is so intimately connected to. This connection is essentially revealed in the following action: as Moses is working in his field, he takes “a pinch of the soil” and eats it, “not only to discover the strengths and weakness of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.” That the earth means so much to him that he feels the need to ingest it, to physically make it a part of him, is significant in the way that, although he is already legally tied to the land since he is a slave bound to work on it, he completely embraces this identity. And in doing so, he has found his own freedom in it-- the freedom to be with and do what he loves. 

This theme of tight kinship with the land continues as the narrator describes the taste of the land, being of a "metallic life," which will soon be replaced by "a sour moldiness" that signaled the "coming of fall and winter, the end of a relationship he had begun with the first taste of dirt back in March." Once again, he is faced with the option to return home and yet, "for the third time that week," he turns away from "home and food and rest." To emphasize what calls to him the most, where he feels most at home, the narrator narrates how "he turned his head slightly to the right and made out what he thought was the sound of playing children, but when he turned his head back, he could hear far more clearly the last bird of the day as it evening-chirped in the small forest far off to the left." The irony at the end is that "when he was an old man and rheumatism chained up his body, he would look back and blame the chains on evenings such as these and on nights when he lost himself completely . . ." Though he had gained his freedom through acceptance of circumstances, they were still chains nonetheless.

This is the aftermath of my second practice prose essay. It was . . . not exactly satisfactory. I'm definitely not where I want to be. As compared to my first essay, I don't think I improved by much. Again, time was my enemy. I did not finish my essay, though I did get further than last time. I felt like I needed more time to process the prose passage and to think through my argument than I should be. One of my goals was to practice analyzing passages so I could become faster and more proficient at it. This way more of my time could be devoted to the crafting of my writing. I kept thinking my thesis had to have complexity right at the beginning; however, when we were norming the essays in class for this same piece, a lot of the higher scoring essays developed their complexity throughout the piece. I always seem to get hung up on the first paragraph because I've been told that it's very important to have a strong introduction, but it's equally, if not more important, to have a strong body building that argument up.

I tried the organization method that I mentioned in my last prose essay reflection- the one where it follows the piece chronologically. I am not sure I used that method correctly. Looking back, I realize that I placed too much emphasis on identifying and examining the literary elements than I did on the deeper meaning of the piece: the development of Moses's character. I began the piece with quite surface level analysis. And though I did delve deeper into the piece, I was still describing one facet of his character, though an important one albeit. I'm not sure that would have earned me a high enough score. And because I was busy analyzing literary elements, I spent more time writing about the beginning of the piece than I did of the end. This was because I would bring up an example of one literary element, explain its significance, then have to move on to the next chronological literary element, explain its significance, when it would have been better to focus on one specific part of the piece and explain how it contributed to Moses's character and used the analysis  of literary elements to support that explanation. That would have made my writing make a lot more sense and having a structure like that would have facilitated my writing and hopefully I would have finished my essay in time.

I would give this essay a 5/6 score because I think I quoted too much from the passage and I didn't have enough of my own analysis. I did however touch on the complexity of the prose and deliver specific text evidence and have a thesis statement that made an argument.