Champion Of The World By Angelou Summary

Champion of the World - Literary Analysis Maya Angelou recounts the night when there were a bunch of people all bunched together in the store listening to the radio, listening to the fight when Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber”, was defending his heavyweight boxing title against a white competitor. The black men within the crowd were talking confidently about how they weren't worried about Louis losing, saying they knew he was going to win. Around after the third round there was a point where Louis was pinned against the ropes and he was stuck getting swung over and over again and the crowd was beginning to groan in disappointment. Even after he got off the ropes and was moving towards the corner of the ring, the crowd didn’t hope for anything; they just waited in
In Maya Angelou's writing “Champion of the world”, one literary device implemented near the beginning of the story is idiom. In the short story, while describing how loud the register was, Angelou used an idiom and said that they weren’t allowed to ring up sales as it would “shake up the atmosphere”. The idiom used, “shake up” is commonly used when describing something or someone being disturbed or upset. So this means that the uncle didn’t allow them to use the register to ring people up for the reason that he thought that because of how noisy it was that it would upset or disturb the atmosphere of the crowd of people trying to listen to the fight on the radio. In the next sentence, after it said the gong rang, signaling the next round, they pushed through the near-sacred silence to the children outside, which means that the crowd is sitting in silence during the fight. This is important for the reason that it shows how tense the crowd is and how important Joe Louis winning the fight is to them. The second literary device used in this story by Angelou that stands out is