Book
Talk #1- Sounder
Sounders
takes place in the 19th century, but I think it specifically takes
place at the beginning of the 19th century before the Dust Bowl and
the Great Depression because the family in the story is a poor and hungry, African
American, sharecropper, southern family.
Sharecropping was one of the few agricultural jobs a black man could
have after the Reconstruction Era of the Civil War. The story itself is about the relationship
between the boy and his father and the father’s dog named Sounder. The story is told in 3rd person
mostly from the perspective of the boy and he seems very melancholy and
serious. You can tell in the story that
the boy is not educated and is not literate and that is something that he wants
to change.
The beginning of Sounder talks about the how hard life is
for the family. They are so poor they
just eat biscuits and gravy for breakfast, which is cheap to fix. Life was very hard for them but then life
gets harder when the dad is arrested and convicted of stealing. On the night the father was arrested by the
local Sheriff and deputies, the dog, Sounder, tries to help the father but was
shot by one of the deputies and ran away.
After losing his father and dog the boy goes to look for the Sounder but
doesn’t find him.
The boy goes to see his father while
he is in jail but the visit didn’t go the way the boy had hoped and his father
told him not to come back. While the
father is in jail and working in a camp, the boy and mother take care of the
dog and the boy befriends a teacher who takes him under his wing and teaches
him to read. A year later the father
comes home. The father is badly burned
and deformed from an accident in the camp.
The family was finally reunited.
One night the father and Sounder go hunting and the family is torn apart
once again by an accident.
Something that I found interesting was
that Sounder was the only character that was given a name especially since the
story was mostly told from the boy’s point of view. I also noticed the boy grows up in the
story. He goes from being a timid
uneducated boy to being an educated young man in a rather short period of time. He loses a sense of innocence because he not
only has to live without his father, and the dog temporarily, he goes and
visits his father in jail which is something children have to do currently. But
he over comes these challenges in life and at the same time he learns to read
which is something he really wanted to do.
So even though the boy doesn’t have a name, his character becomes a
bigger part of the story as he matures.
