A Lesson Before Dying
Discussion questions
1. How can helping someone else actually teach you something about yourself and
make you grow?
2. What is the lesson?
3. Who learns it?
4. How can you find freedom in imprisonment?
5. How can a person strive for dignity in a universe that often denies it (not only
then, but in our present age)?
6. Why isn’t Grant a hero?
7. How can self-worth be maintained under adverse conditions?
8. All the characters in A Lesson Before Dying are motivated by a single word:
"hog." Jefferson's attorney has compared him to a hog; Miss Emma wants Grant
to prove that her godson is not a hog; and Jefferson at first eats the food she has
sent him on his knees, because "that's how a old hog eat." How are words used
both to humiliate and to redeem the characters in this novel? How can stereotypes
harm us?
9. Grant's task is to affirm that Jefferson is not a hog, but a man. The mission is
doubly difficult because Grant isn't sure he knows what a man is. What definition
of manhood, or humanity, does A Lesson Before Dying provide? Why is
manhood a revolutionary notion within the book's setting?
10. The central character is a man without faith. Grant's refusal to attend church has
deeply hurt his aunt and antagonized Reverend Ambrose, whose religion Grant at
first dismisses as a sham. Yet at the book's climax he admits that Ambrose "is
braver than I," and he has his pupils pray in the hours before Jefferson's death.
What kind of faith does Grant acquire in the course of this book? Why does the
Reverend emerge as the stronger of the two men?
11. Grant believes that black men in Louisiana have only three choices: to die
violently, to be "brought down to the level of beasts," or "to run and run." How
does the way in which Gaines articulates these grim choices--and suggests an
alternative to them--make A Lesson Before Dying applicable not only to
Louisiana in 1948 but to the United States in the 1990s?
12. Women play a significant role in the book. Examine the scenes between Grant
and Tante Lou, Grant and Vivian, and Jefferson and Miss Emma, and discuss the
impetus that Gaines's women provide his male characters. In what ways do these
interactions reflect the roles of black women within their families and in AfricanAmerican society?
13. A Lesson Before Dying is concerned with obligation and commitment. Discuss
this theme as it emerges in the exchanges between Emma Glenn and the Pichots,
Grant and Vivian, and Grant and the Reverend Ambrose. What are the debts these
people owe each other? In what ways do they variously try to honor, evade, or
exploit them?
14. From the manslaughter that begins this novel to the judicial murder at its close,
death is a constant presence in A Lesson Before Dying. We are repeatedly
reminded of all the untimely, violent deaths that have preceded Jefferson's and, in
all likelihood, will follow it. Why then is Jefferson's death so disturbing to this
book's black characters, and even to some of its white ones? What does
Jefferson's death accomplish that his life could not?
Courtesy of Random House, Inc.
Gaines is able to depict this world so precisely because he grew up in it. His parents,
Manuel and Adrienne Colar Gaines, were sharecroppers on the River Lake Plantation
near Oscar, Louisiana. Gaines has commented several times on his experience of digging
potatoes in the fields at the age of five. Also significant in his development was his Aunt
Augusteen, a woman who, though unable to walk, managed to care for Ernest and his
younger brothers while their parents worked. She became for him the symbol of the
devout and determined black woman who refused to be overwhelmed by circumstances;
such women appear in virtually all of his works. At the age of fifteen, he moved to
California to join his mother and stepfather. It was here that he began a habit of voracious
reading that gave him formal models for the kind of storytelling he wanted to do.
A Lesson before Dying (1993) continues the theme of manhood in its narrative of a
young man who is condemned to die and the schoolteacher who is asked to talk with him.
The issue for Gaines is not so much the fairness of the legal system as it is the means by
which self-worth can be achieved and maintained under adverse conditions. He is
interested, in other words, in what Hemingway called "grace under pressure." This has
special resonance for Gaines's work since to the personal struggle must be added the
reality of racial oppression. Grant's task in the novel is not to save Jefferson but rather to
convince him that he is not the "hog" he was described as being by his own lawyer in the
trial.
Source: Keith E. Byerman, "Ernest J. Gaines: Overview," in Reference Guide to
American Literature, 3rd ed., edited by Jim Kamp, St. James Press, 1994.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center