HUMAN COURAGE AND DIGNITY IN ERNEST J. GAINS A LESSON BEFORE DYING

This research is on human courage and dignity in Ernest J. Gainess novel, A Lesson Before Dying. People are able to face threat, pain, danger, or even death in order to maintain their right and dignity relying on courage.This is library research and applies mimetic criticism proposed by Abrams saying that a work of literature is the imitation of the real world. It depicts human being who struggles to maintain and get acknowledgement of their right and dignity to live in respect and worth.The analysis focused on how courage and dignity raise someone who is desperated into brave and thoughtful to face his death. He is desperated because of a false accusision of being a murderer, compared as a hog, and sentenced to death in electric chair. Comparing to a hog makes him lost his courage and self-esteem. He eliminates himself and does not want to speak with others. His godmother disagrees with it and asks a teacher to teach him that he is a human being and should die as a human being too. Then, he is taught by a teacher of moral and obligation to face his death courageously and show that he is a human being who has duty and responsibility. Finally, he is able to sacrifice his death as a symbol of his courage and dignity to himself, his family and community. It is found that the author Ernest J Gains through the novel has vividly portrayed human beings who have courage are able to maintain and get acknowledgement of their right and dignity although they have to face threat, pain, danger, or even death.

They Got Their Show

What does it take to forgive? Why can’t we force ourselves to forgive sooner? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Nick’s high school daughter was murdered on her way to the Blockbuster Video store in 1995. Her friend and classmate, Benjie, was found guilty of her murder. Twenty years later a Netflix true crime series interviewed the witnesses and shined a light on the case, causing it to be reexamined. After 20 years, Benjie is released from prison as innocent. Nick is an alcoholic who, for 20 years, has failed to move on from his daughter’s death and dreamed of Benjie getting the electric chair. Now, he is called to be the taxi driver that picks Benjie up from the prison. They talk, and Nick begins to find forgiveness.

Blackorwhite

What is the purpose of the criminal legal system? What factors should we take into account when punishing criminals? In this work of philosophical short story of fiction, the prison medical doctor is called in the middle of the night to take care of Fuzzy, an uneducated, mostly toothless, prisoner who has spent the majority of his life behind bars. Fuzzy, it seems, has gotten into eating cheese, something that strongly disagrees with his stomach and causes severe diarrhea. While the doctor waits for Fuzzy on the toilet and treats him for dehydration he learns Fuzzy’s story. Fuzzy was a young child from a poor family when his brother got him into a small-time gang robbing homes. Fuzzy and his brother wanted to get out of their life and move to Houston to look for legitimate work, but need enough money from a big heist to cover their travel fees. Their final heist goes wrong and the police show up. Fuzzy watches his brother get wrongly gunned down and, in a panic, hops in the van to try to get away. In the process he hits and kills a police officer with the van. The remaining members of the gang are captured and found guilty. Fuzzy, it seems, was able to eat so much cheese as it was his “last meal” on death row and assumed he wouldn’t be around for the results. However, there was a last-minute error with the electric chair so he was forced to face the retribution of his culinary choices. Hearing Fuzzy’s story, the doctor feels greater sympathy for Fuzzy and his life.

Book Review: The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney, Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South

Tamara Law reviews The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South by Eli Faber with a Forward by Carol Berkin.

Sartre’s Existentialism for Grant and Jefferson’s Educational Commitment in Ernest J. Gaines’s Novel: A Lesson Before Dying Lord of the Flies

Racism and Injustice have put Jefferson, a poor young black man, into an electrocution for murder and burglary that he has never done. As a coloured, he cannot do anything than accept the defense attorney verdict – white American Supreme Court’s desegregation – who addresses him as a “hog.” It leaves an inferior feeling that he is nothing but a hog. Comparing him to a hog attracts Miss Emma’s protest that she would like him walking to the electric chair as a human. Therefore, to get Jefferson understands that he is worth a man, she asks Grant Wiggins – an educated black teacher to educate him so he could die a man. In fact, the biggest challenge Grant faces when he looks at Jefferson is his feeling of looking at himself as a man experiencing the same type of racism and discrimination at the oppressive white community. Whereas, educating Jefferson to be a man is difficult as he has to make himself confident with his existence before determining ways of assuring Jefferson as an existing man who will walk to the electric chair on two feet, not a hog. Educating is underpinning people to have great control over lives and surroundings. Its importance deals with functioning the knowledge significant to empower. This is convincing that Jefferson should be educated so that he will not degrade himself as coloured because of his inability to say even a word to defend himself. Using the existentialism philosophy, Grant and Jefferson’s educational commitment in A Lesson Before Dying is discussed based on five themes of Sartre’s existentialism. It reveals that Grant does not get any positive response once he starts teaching. Gradually, Jefferson speaks to him after being attracted by his personal feelings. Grant’s ultimate achievement is when he can make Jefferson writes a diary, to portray some individual matters. What Grant has accomplished is his ability to link the themes, relevant to the philosophy of education. Grant succeeds in transforming Jefferson as a man who has dignity.

Touching a Button

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison to describe how the electric chair mobilized electricity’s spiritual potential for the mass reproduction of death. Exploring how William Dean Howells and other opponents of the chair linked its technological effects to the mass popularity of the push-button photograph, the chapter examines photography’s collusion with the electric chair’s production of stillness as a form of racial terror, while analyzing Van der Weyde’s photographs as realist reenactments of an electrified touch. The chapter reads these photographs alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a text that mobilizes “electric affects” to theorize the circulations of religious feeling and racial terror at the nadir of American race relations, even as the novel itself becomes an electrifying performance circulating in and through the shock of spectacular violence. Yoking the “electrifying climax” of the camp meeting to the “electric current” of the lynch mob, Johnson channels the language of circuitry to suggest the centrality of both practices in defining and disfiguring the “real” of secular modernity.

Hanging, the Electric Chair, and Death Penalty Reform in the Early Twentieth-Century South

examines the moment when southern states adopted the electric chair by studying Florida’s fraught and uneven transition in the 1920s. Compared to the amateurish and messy practice of hanging, the electric chair offered efficiency, professionalism, and privacy, leading state officials to celebrate it as a form of “penal modernism.” This modernism, however, shifted authority of criminal justice from local sheriffs to a centralized state bureaucracy. This chapter highlights the effects of this shift on long-standing execution rituals, which came to be imbued with new class, gender, and racial constrictions that were emblematic of the modernizing, industrial state.

Machinery of Death or Machinic Life

Justice Blackmun’s 1994 decision to “tinker with the machinery of death” no more brings into focus the problem of an instantaneous death penalty that was raised by Eighth Amendment objections to the firing squad and electric chair at the end of the nineteenth century. A review of American death penalty jurisprudence reveals that the instant is not the only temporal question raised: the doctrine of “evolving standards” presumes a speed of evolution that is impossible to determine and compares different evolutions among electorates, legislatures, and countries within the international community. By examining those questions in the context of Blackmun’s Callins dissent I argue that what the machinery of death reveals above all is a concept of technological time.