Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between the humorous language style, situational humor, and humorous characterization and the initiation of Sara, the protagonist narrator of Bread Givers. Backed with humor and initiation theories, four events in Sara's life will be discussed in detail so as to establish the argument that wide-ranging humor helps narrate and construct the essential steps of Sara's ultimate maturation. These four events are as follows: (1) Sara's departure from her parents' home; (2) Sara's renting a room of her own in New York; (3) Sara's rejection of a rich young man's proposal; and (4) Sara's integration of reconciliation with her tyrannical father into her acculturation. Sara, rising from the ghetto to become a college-educated schoolteacher in the public school, succeeds in achieving maturation and Americanization through her decision for reconciliation with her father, her Jewish legacy by extension.
Highlights
Identity formation has been of vital and lasting interest in American literature
Mary Dearborn observes in her Pocahontas’s Daughters, “the central feature of American identity is the experience of migration that Americans are all descended from immigrants and that American selfhood is based on a seemingly paradoxical sense of shared difference” (3)
In terms of the academic criticism of the theme of initiation in both English and American literature, Jerome Hamilton Buckley has been highly influential with his Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (1974)
Summary
Identity formation has been of vital and lasting interest in American literature. Mary Dearborn observes in her Pocahontas’s Daughters, “the central feature of American identity is the experience of migration that Americans are all descended from immigrants and that American selfhood is based on a seemingly paradoxical sense of shared difference” (3). Book III concludes with Sara’s return to New York City and her employment as a schoolteacher in the public school, her rise from rags to material and intellectual riches, so to speak.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call