Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
“A father writes his Black son the letter every generation prays it won't have to write — and explains why America has always depended on destroying Black bodies to sustain itself.”
Characters in Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015 · 6 characters analyzed
Cast: Ta-Nehisi Coates (narrator), Samori Coates, Prince Jones, Dr. Mable Jones, Paul Coates (father), James Baldwin (absent presence).
Character Analysis
Coates is both the analytical mind organizing the argument and the grieving man writing to his son. He refuses the role of prophet-with-answers; he is a witness with questions. His intellectual honesty about his own limits — his inability to share Dr. Jones's faith, his inability to offer Samori guaranteed hope — is the source of the book's moral authority.
Formally literary but grounded in material and physical language — the sentence structures of a serious intellectual, the vocabulary of someone who taught himself