Example of Analysis and Explication

Many readers believe that description is the least important part of any story and can be skipped without much consequence; however, the description at the opening of Jean Toomer’s “Blood-Burning Moon” not only is significant because it conveys the story’s setting but is also important because it foreshadows events sets the tone of the entire story. Skipping the description causes the reader to miss the setting of the story, to fail to gather hints of the inhumane events about to happen, and to neglect to perceive the ominous feelings the story conveys. Missing these important clues makes for a historically inaccurate and an emotionally absent reader who, most likely, will not fully understand or enjoy the story.

Most notable, in the very first sentence of the story “Blood-Burning Moon,” the narrator repeats the word “up,” three times and a fourth time at the beginning of the second one. The walls, the floor, the moon – all are rising, but the hour is “dusk,” a time when dark and light are mixed and things should be dying down and setting. Normally, rising is considered to be a positive movement; however, this bloody moon “Glowing like a fired pine-knot” and the movement of Louisa’s mind “vaguely upon [Bob and Tom] as she walks over the crest of the hill coming from white folks’ kitchen” (1274) while the “The moon was rising” (1275) increasingly are not positive omens. Everything portends something that is about to happen, and although no one knows exactly what it is, the sensations are threatening. After all, images of destruction abound from the start. The walls are “skeleton stone walls” reminiscent of bones without flesh or a corpse; the walls are almost human since they are described as “skeleton,” and the new economy that the emancipated slaves are taking part in which is reflected in the description of the "rotting" floor boards lets the reader know that it is not allowing the African American people to lead better lives; finally, the factory is described as a “pre-war cotton factory,” informing the reader that the freed men are currently working in the same building they worked in while they were slaves. The ghosts of the pasts haunt the black people in their new lives. Furthermore, “pre-war cotton” immediately brings pictures of slaves working the fields to mind. The reader can picture the slaves bending in the heat and picking the crops. Then the reader sees “shanties aligned along the single street of factory town” – a ghettoized slum. Clearly the moon’s “pine-knot” glow ”illumined the [factory’s] great door,” and the black begin to sing “against its spell.” Nothing promising is about to happen here. Fear, doom, death, and blood mark the beginning of Jean Toomer’s story. Though the story is taking place during the early years of reconstruction, the remnants of slavery still abound within the culture. The landscape and nature carry the bloodshed and the spirit of all the evil that has transpired here over the years and all that is yet to come in this story.