The Color Of Water Rhetorical Analysis

The Color of Water Prompt #2 The narrator in The Color of Water changes back and forth throughout the novel between the point of views of Ruth and her son James McBride. This writing style that he uses helps you better understand how Ruth grew up and how she was raised compared to how she raised James. They also dealt with a lot of the same personal issues. They both grew up in completely different times and places but they both still were confronted with a lot of the same daily struggles. Some of the struggles they went through were issues such as race, sense of identity, religion, family, grief, and secrets. We’re going to analyze parallels and contradictions between their lives and provide examples and quotes. Race was one of the biggest issues that both James and Ruth went through in their lives.
James had always wondered why his mother was a different color than the rest of the family but whenever she would get asked a question she would answer the question without giving them the information they actually wanted by saying something like, “I do look like you.
I’m your mother” (13), she said that when asked by James why she didn’t look like him or anyone else in the family. Throughout her entire life Ruth never cared about what religion someone was or what the color of their skin was; all she cared about was what they were like as a person. This is shown when she falls in love for the first time and it is a black man. Even though Ruth knew her family wouldn’t approve of that she dated him anyways because he treated her nicely and he didn’t judge her. James never really had racism directed at him personally in the book but he was always conflicted with which side to take. As a child he believed that the Black Panthers were out to get his mom and that they were going to kill her. He was conflicted because all of his peers and neighbors seemed to support the Black Panthers but he thought that he couldn’t because he wanted his mother to be
safe. Another big part of James and Ruth’s stories was when, at different times, they had lost their sense of identity. Ruth lost her identity when she decided to move away from her family into New York and marry a black man. Her family “sat Shiva” for her and she was considered dead to them. After this she didn’t really know who she was for a while but her new husband Dennis helped her find out what she really wanted to be and what she really wanted to be was a
Christian woman married to a black man. James always struggled with his sense of identity as a child because he was always confused about why his mother was white and because he had n o idea where she had come from. When Ruth starts to explain where she came from and the things that she had experienced, James starts to piece together who he really is. He could never really know his true identity until he knew his mother’s because you can’t truly understand the present until you understand the future: “I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid down her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.” After she said this James could finally see why Ruth believed in what she believed and why she acted the way that she did. Both Ruth and James also had very different family lives. Ruth’s family was never a very caring family. Her mother tried her best to take care of her but she still didn’t provide her with the love and the comfort that Ruth ended up giving her children. Ruth didn’t feel safe with her family either because her father touched her as a child so even the people that Ruth was supposed to be able to trust and feel safe with she was scared to be around them at all. Ruth obviously hated this type of family so she tried to be as caring as she could with her children and she tried to raise them to be the best people that they could possibly be. This is told in the epilogue of the book, “Her children became doctors, professors, chemists, teachers” (xix). Every single one of her children ended up getting degrees in college and leading successful lives. As a child Ruth was raised with discipline and that is one of the things that she learned from her parents that she used to raise her children. But she didn’t only discipline them, she treated her kids with kindness as well sometimes.