The Lesson Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 47 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Lesson.

The Lesson Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 47 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Lesson.
This section contains 1,469 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Lesson Study Guide

In the following essay, Hargrove traces the painful process Sylvia undergoes as "she is forced to realize the unfairness of life."

[A] painful experience of disillusionment appears in what is perhaps the best of the fifteen stories, "The Lesson." Again, the story centers on and owes much of its vitality to its first-person narrator, a young girl named Sylvia. Arrogant, sassy, and tough, with a vocabulary that might shock a sailor, Sylvia is also witty, bright, and vulnerable. In the course of the story she learns a lesson which disillusions her about the world in which she lives, about the society of which she is a part. Against her will, she is forced to realize the unfairness of life and, as a black girl, her often low position in the scheme of things. Although she fights against this realization and indeed refuses adamantly even to acknowledge it...

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This section contains 1,469 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Lesson Study Guide
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The Lesson from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.