Rhetorical Devices In Salvation

In Salvation Hughes tells of his confusing yet life changing event that occurred in his church. Hughes sat in church expecting Jesus to come into his life, but Jesus never came. When Langston alone sat on the bench and everyone crying and praying for him, he decides to get up and pretend to be saved. That night he cries for hours regretting what he did. Now that Hughes grew up he now can tell his story of that day in the church. Langston tells of his childhood experience and conveys into an adult understanding by using several strategies. These strategies consist of his naiveté, exaggeration, and sentence structure. When you read Salvation you notice how naïve Hughes makes himself out to be. For example he says “still I kept waiting to
see Jesus” it emphasizes the child that experienced what happened that day because no one can actually see Jesus. Throughout the story he makes similar comments on how he wants to see Jesus and be saved. Instead of Hughes telling what he thinks of the event now he, in a way shows you what happened and what he was thinking about in the church. Another strategy that Hughes used was exaggeration to describe the setting around him at the time. When Hughes describes the people crying, praying and singing around him when he doesn’t go up to be saved, he describes a chaotic scene. Most likely at the time it probably was not that hectic and dramatic. Still with this it shows you how that affected him so greatly and still stuck with him. The way Hughes may have stretched the reality of the church scene shows you how he is able to show you what he felt and happened that day. Finally the various ways the sentences are constructed from short to long and run on sentences which tell you a great deal about the church scene. When Hughes would write long sentence and have then go on and on it made you really believe that a child was writing this and wanted to tell you everything in one breath. Also when Hughes wrote very brief sentences they made you think a child was coming up with more and more things to say as he went on. Both of these sentence structures would grip you and tell you a lot about what was going on and how he felt. It showed Hughes was able to make an adult analysis about what happened and write it in a unique way. In Conclusion Hughes was very clever about telling you about how he felt that day. All of these strategies he used were telling you about how he felt and interpreted what happened that day. The strategies were used to show how Hughes showed his adult understanding of his childhood experience.