Langston Hughes Salvation Summary

I cannot cut out a piece of my head and give it to you. Unfortunately, lobotomies performed by untrained individuals such as myself tend to end in death. Even if I did manage to harvest a little piece of my brain and live long enough to place it in your hand, you would only have a lifeless, squishy mass of tissue that used to be inside of my skull. There would be no memories or emotions; you would be no closer to understanding my experiences or me as a person. That’s the thing about the human mind: it is not a physical entity. There is no scientific method to appreciating what another person has been through. So how do we, as humans, explain ourselves and elicit empathy and compassion?
This is where a beautiful thing called language comes in.
Using nothing but words, we can translate something as abstract as the human mind into a form that people can grasp and connect with: a story. We can make others comprehend our emotions, our fears, our logic, our joys, and our struggles. The power of narration is the power to make someone else understand. It is dissecting your own mind and giving pieces of it to another person. Instead of a lobotomy of the brain, narration is a lobotomy of the mind.
The first part of their mind that a narrator gives you is their occipital lobe.
This is the part of the brain that controls everything related to vision. A storyteller might describe what they have seen to give you a sense of place and help you imagine what it looked like to be there with the writer. In his short story “Salvation,” Langston Hughes uses this part of narration to describe the elderly of his church. “A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands.” Even this small description is enough to help a reader start to put themselves in Hughes’ shoes. Visualization is the beginning of understanding another
person.
Then, a narrator might hand you their parietal lobe, which deals with spatial orientation, touch, and pain. They will explain to you how it felt physically to interact with their environment, how different sensations affected them, and how painful their struggles were. Ishmael Beah describes his pain in great detail all throughout A Long Way Gone. In one instance, he and his friends are forced to walk across hot sand barefoot. “Each time I lifted my feet, the veins in them tightened and I felt the sand particles digging into my bleeding soles. The next several miles were so long I didn’t think I would be able to make it. I perspired and my body shuddered from the pain” (61). At the very least, graphic descriptions such as this one will garner sympathy from a reader, another crucial step on the way to empathizing with others.
After this, a storyteller may choose to give you their cerebellum.
The cerebellum is in charge of fear, pleasure, and attention, all things a writer can use to explain themselves to a reader. We are all familiar with feeling scared or happy, so this is a great way for readers to connect with narrators in moments when these feelings overwhelmed them. In her essay “Mission Iraq,” Allison Perkins details her fear and disorientation her first time in a war zone. “I felt lost between reality and this strange place that somehow seemed like it couldn’t really exist. It was a world where danger waited at every turn…” Perkins’ description gives the reader the ability to dive just a little deeper into the narrator’s thoughts and emotions at the
time.
Next comes the temporal lobe. This part of the brain contains the hippocampus, which stores our long term memories. In narration, a writer will recall the memories that have affected them most throughout their lives, with the aim of demonstrating what happened that made them who they are. In A Long Way Gone, Beah both tells about his life as a child soldier, and about how his experiences changed him forever. This really helps the reader to understand the gravity and trauma of his struggles. Recalling one’s most significant experiences is one of the most crucial aspects to storytelling, as it puts the narrator’s thoughts, behaviors, and feelings into context.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a narrator will give you their frontal lobe, which controls judgement, behavior, personality, and emotion. That is a whole lot to try to explain to another person, but in a narrative, describing these things can transform a passive spectator to an invested participant in the story. The reader can now fully put themselves in someone else’s shoes. When someone explains what they felt, and what they thought that made them act how they did, we start to understand them better as a person, and understand their experience better. We become more compassionate and willing to help their cause, making the writer’s toil over finding the perfect words to describe their story completely worth it.
While narration is not a literal lobotomy, I like to think it is as close as someone not in the medical profession can get to slicing up their brain and giving it to the world. In the end, storytelling is the difference between knowing and feeling. We all know that war is horrifying, or that the sinking of the Titanic was sad, or that a turtle skiing is impressive, but most of us have never lived these things, so we cannot truly understand what others felt. Through narration, we become a part of someone else’s story. We read their experiences, their pain, their joy, and become invested in their history like we were there. We become more than just an onlooker. We start to empathize with and care about them. Storytelling, then, makes us more compassionate and aware individuals, and helps us to better understand each other, which ultimately makes the world a better and more tolerant place.