A Comparison of the Narratives in Salvation by Langston Hughes and Me Talk Pretty One Day

In “Salvation” by Langston Hughes, the young boy is at a church in a situation where all the elders of the church want all the young ones of the church to get saved during a revival. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, a middle-aged man is in France with the situation of wanting to learn French. Both narratives have people wanting the narrator to do something, but the narrator doesn’t immediately cooperate.

An example of such struggle in “Salvation” would be in paragraphs five and six when the boy still hasn’t gone down to get saved and just sits there with his friend. One example of struggle in “Me Talk Pretty One Day” would be the teacher’s horrible demeanor on page 343 where the teacher flat out tells the narrator “I hate you” or on page 344 where she stabs a student in the eye with a pencil. This creates a conflict of the narrator feeling belittled and like he could never understand it as shown on pages 343 and 344.

The conflict in the Sedaris article is a little different; the boy wants to physically see Jesus and not just take everybody’s word for it. Hughes makes this clear by saying “I kept waiting to see Jesus” in the fifth paragraph. Something does come out of this conflict though; the boy ends up getting saved. Something comes out of the conflict in the Sedaris article also; in the Sedaris narrative, the narrator ends up understanding what the teacher says and is actually able to respond to her. The meaning of this is that someone might be able to understand a language but not necessarily speak it and to never give up on learning. In the article by Hughes, the meaning would be that a problem might seem temporarily fixed, but it could come back and cause stress later. In conclusion, both narratives are well-written with conflicts of not exactly doing what the surroundings want them to do but overcoming it in their own way.