Question

HELP ASAP PLEASE!!

Read the following excerpt from "Notes of a Native Son":

That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant's warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood — one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.

Analyze Baldwin's use of metaphor in this excerpt. How does this rhetorical device contribute to his message and the essay's power?

Answer 1

Baldwin talks of a "disease" which afflicts black Americans and can wreck race relations and creating a "rage in the blood" so he is using the "disease" as a metaphor for probably the rage that black Americans have for experiencing the inequalities of life in the US especially in the 1960's when the civil rights movement was so strong and segregation was so strongly practiced in the South still.