Honky Literary Elements

Autobiography

The action described takes place in New York starting from 1969 till present day.

The action is told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view.

The tone and mood in this autobiography is a resentful one.

The protagonists are the black community and the antagonists are the white community.

The major conflict in this autobiography is between the racist views white people have and the desire the black people have to be treated equally.

The action in the autobiography reaches its climax when the narrator's father finds a stable job.

The instance in which Dalton is not punished by his teacher at the beginning of the book is used here to foreshadow the way in which Dalton will benefit from being white.

One of the biggest understatements we find is the idea that parents can protect their children. This is proven to be an understatement when the narrator describes the violent altercations he had despite the best protection his parents gave him.

One of the main allusions presented here is that no matter how much parents try to protect their children, they are unable to.

One of the most important images appears at the beginning of the novel when the narrator describes his memories from pre-school. There, the narrator was the only white child. The rest of the children tries to get the only white doll to play with. This scene transmits the idea that from a young age children learn that being white is better than having a darker skin color.

One of the main paradoxes in the autobiography is the way in which the narrator desires to suffer just so he could feel equal to the rest of the people around him.

No parallelism can be found here.

Whiteness is used here as a general term to transmit the idea of privilege.

We have a personification in the sentence "the streets scream of pain and misery".