Plot Analysis

In her ground-breaking breeze A Raisin in the Sun, Lorrown(prenominal)e Hansberry challenged widespread cultural conceptions clam uply African Americans.By focusing her play on stark realism, Hansberry was able to create a play which, in both theme and technological execution, offered something radically different than the portrayal of American life typically seen on Broadway stages in the mid twentieth century.The impact of the play, both visually and textually, on American listenings was visceral and controversial. Hansberry relied on depicting vastly disparate randy states and conditions for her characters, as well as enticing her audience to experience the adult male of her characters with as much empathy as possible.The plays inauguration, for example, establishes that the Younger family is waiting for a ten-thousand buck insurance check to arrive after the death of the familys father.The fact that the family is so steeped in mendicancy that each of them concocts ela borate schemes and ideas of how to spend the money forward it even arrives, grips the reader or alert audience member with feeling and concern. The intrusion of the expected money also begins the tension in the play and drives the conflicts amongst the plays characters., or so notably between Mama and Walter Lee.In order to de humand the audience, and to cause them to identify with the Youngers, Hansberry uses the device of realism, which includes the construction of a one-room apartment set, sleep together with all the trappings of poverty cramped quarters, worn furniture and carpets, and a conspicuous lack of privacy.Before the audience has even begun to grasp the events of the play, they are at once aware of the familys dire financial situation.The shock of the set at a purely visual and spatial level gos the Youngers distress to the audience. Teh ensuing emotional tension between Mama and her son is meant to show that the external attri simplyes of poverty have corresp onding emotional and psychological impacts and have extended to the relationships between the characters.By the end of the opening scene, the reader or audience member knows that nifty rely and expectation has been pinned by the family on the insurance money and many readers or spectators of the play would probably intuit that the familys emotional crisis goes far beyond anything which can be repaired with money.The idea is to advance the plot in a true-to-life(prenominal) manner so that the audience or reader not only experiences the events of the play but feels the emotional resonance which is intended to be a part of the event which are portrayed. In order to light upon this, every aspect of the play, not only the plot, are steeped in realism.One division of dramatic technique that enables Hansberry to successfully create a dynamic and pictorial drama is her use of vernacular in the plays dialogue.Un wish the blank-verse constructions of Shakespeare, or the witticism of Os car Wilde, or even the inhalationy musings of Tennessee Williams, Hansberry delivers the dialogue of A Raisin in the Sun in colloquial language and this aspect of them play enhances the plays verisimilitude.The realism of the play thusly causes the audience to more closely identify with the plays characters and plot, and each of these aspects of the play helps to communicate the historic sociological and racial themes that drive A Raisin in the Sun.This assistance to realism and detail is important to the plays plot, also, because as the vents of the play unfold, the reader is careworn more deeply into an emotional connection with the characters because the characters seem for all intents and purposes to be actual people who face actual, real-life struggles.As the plot progresses, the insurance check genuinely arrives and in their haste to be a controlling interest in the spending of the money, each of the Youngers manages to ignore the opposites emotional needs in credit li ne of personal materialistic dreams.When Mama decides to use the money to move the family to a white neighborhood, a further sense of doom pervades th fill as the Youngers fall further into emotional discord.Throughout the progression of the plot, the plays dialogue leaves an opening for the emotional outpouring which is markedly absent from the (seemingly banal) progression of events.Hansberrys dialogue, in fact, becomes a key driving force of the plays ultimate revelatory impact on the audience. As the play progresses and the characters become more clearly defined with motivations that the audience can identify with (or despise) the dialect of the play begins to draw a melodic uniqueness a vocal music which was unlike any other play on the Broadway stage of the time.Lines such as Seem like God didnt see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams. (29) or There is always something left to love. And if you aint learned that, you aint learned nothing.(135) attain the status of aphorism in the context of the play and divulge important social and racial realities that, for most Americans in the mid-twentieth century, existed, if at all, as exactly si-debar newspaper articles or in some other abstract realization.Hansberrys play, by means of its fierce and relentless realism, coupled with its themes of yearning and dreaming seemed to marry the American ideal to the American nightmare in a verbally professional and thematically cathartic fashion, elevating the dialogue of racial issues in America to a place of cultural acceptance.Simultaneously, the plays plot moves in an arc of excited expectation to dissolution of dreams while expressing the internal progressions of the characters with a portrayal of external events.When Mrs. Johnson tells the Youngers about a black family that was bombed because they moved into a white neighborhood, the audience feels the dream of Mamas to live in a better neighborhood deflating.The audience realizes that money, alone, p atronage the naivete with which the Youngers regard its power, leave alone do little, perhaps nothing, to change the trial of their lives.The Youngers have regarded money and the future hope of what it may bring with a sort of exotic hopefulness which, in its perceived futility during the vents of the play, should cause emotional frustration and fraudulent scheme in the reader and in the the audience.This dissonance reflects the same dissonance which exists between the Youngers dreams and their actual position in the world.By combining a realistic set with realistic dialogue, a kind of exoticism was reached by Hansberry, through and through the depiction of extreme poverty and want, which is a powerful force in granting the play unity of theme, place, and time in keeping with Aristotles theories of dramatic construction in his Poetics.This latter attribute helps ground the play in the handed-down dramatic structure which off-sets the aforementioned exoticism of the plays set and characters.Despite the reluctance for most Americans in the late 50s and early 60s to face the racially based challenges of that era, A Raisin in the Sun demonstrated, through creative expression, the urgency of the plight of African Americans in a racist society.The plays climax, when it is decided that despite the conflicts and hardships that the money has caused that Mamas invent to move to a new neighborhood will go through, exerts a sense of hopefulness in the face of manifested obstacles (and potential violence) which seems to suggest that optimism, ambition, and togetherness can live storms and find fulfillment despite the truth of prejudice and poverty.However, a close reading of the play is just as likely to reveal in the reader, a sense that the Youngers are simply caught in a barbarous cycle of hope and despair and that with each new breath of hope a corresponding crush of bad luck or ill-fortune will be experienced. It is not fitting to say that the play, therefore , has a happy ending, but simply an ending which reflects an unfailing cycle of hope against an equally unending series of obstacles.Work CitedHansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Random House, New York. 1959