John Edgar Wideman took the title of his story, “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence,” from the last line of a work by an Austrian philosopher: Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). A possible interpretation of Wittgenstein’s sentence and the argument that leads up to it is that the…
Tag: John Edgar Wideman
What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence – Setting
Race, Imprisonment, and the Socioeconomic Divide In the later half of the nineteenth century, some American states passed laws restricting privileges given to emancipated African Americans after the Civil War. These so-called Jim Crow laws segregated African Americans from the white population and denied them equal status with whites in all aspects of their lives,…
What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence – Literary Devices
Stream of Consciousness In this story, Wideman uses a stream-ofconsciousness and experimental language, both reminiscent of the work of the Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941). Stream-of-consciousness presents an interior monologue of the narrator, allowing us to see inside the mind of the character as it associates ideas and moves along in a flow of thoughts….
What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence – Themes
Imprisonment “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence” features the narrator’s obsession with the imprisoned son of his dead friend. The story offers a critique of the prison system, reflecting the author’s activism on the subject. As of 2006, Wideman’s son and younger brother were both serving life sentences for murder,…
What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence – Characters
Friend The narrator’s friend is already dead when the story opens. He is only once referred to by his name, Donald Williams. Before he died, the friend told the narrator that he had a son in prison, whom he visited about once a year. The friend said that the hardest part about visiting was walking…
What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence – Summary
“What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence” begins with the anonymous fiftyseven-year-old narrator announcing that he has a friend with a son in an Arizona prison. About once a year, this friend visits his son. The friend says that the hardest part of visiting is leaving, in the painful knowledge that…
The Beginning of Homewood – Analysis
Like William Faulkner does in his novels and stories set in the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha, Wideman creates a complex landscape in “The Beginning of Homewood” that allows him to enmesh his characters in webs of moral ambiguities. The community of Homewood founded by runaway slave Sybela Owens, the narrator’s great-great-great-grandmother, is certainly not an…
The Beginning of Homewood – Summary
The story opens as the narrator tries to explain how the story came into being. It began, he says, as a letter to his brother, which he ”began writing on a Greek island two years ago, but never finished, never sent.” Addressing his absent brother, he then proceeds to tell “the story that came before…