Hard Rick
William Penn once wrote " No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne, no gall, no glory; no cross, and no crown." This quote strongly relates to Etheridge Knight's Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane, for the main character of Knight's Hard Rock too is faced with the struggle between his desire for elevated status among his admirers and defiance of the norms of the society. During the era of 1950s and the 1960s, our country was overcome by the struggle for humanity and human suffrage. In 1955, Dr. Martin Luther King led the charge against the government for unfair treatment of African Americans by accepting leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States. His leadership and rebellious force was the first great wave of the Civil Rights Movement to sweep the country. Etheridge Knight boldly parallels the life of Hard Rock and that of Dr. Martin Luther King by illustrating the obvious differences and obscure similarities. The title of the poem itself is an important element in understanding the parallelism that is formed between the two individuals. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King set his nonviolent tactics in full swing in Birmingham,
The fourth and the last paragraph tie in together, for they both depict Hard Rock's test after the surgery and relay the disappointment of the prisoners for the shortcoming of their hero. Prisoners in this poem signify the African American community that too desired the goals of freedom, as did Hard Rock and Martin Luther King, but lacked the courage to retaliate against the society. Hard Rock's lack of response to the racial taunting of the hillbilly was the first evidence of his failure, which related to the assassination of Martin Luther King. As in the disappointment and denial of the prisoners upon the lack of action on part of Hard Rock, the African American community upon Martin Luther King's assassination was engulfed in war between finding another strong leader to replace Dr. King's vision and courage or loosing their hopes and desires for eternity. The third stanza contains the conversation of two prisoners reminiscing Hard Rock's exploits for which he was denounced the dreaded sentence that robbed him of his true nature. This stanza is unique in a way that it provides a reader with not only an account of what had occurred prior to his torture, but also goes on to emphasize the idea of Hard Rock as being a concrete character defying all authority without alarm of the consequences that might await him. The dialogue, "Ol Hard Rock! Man, that's one crazy nigger," is significant in manner that it solidifies the parallelism between the life of Hard Rock and that of Martin Luther King. Like Hard Rock, Dr. King, too regardless of fear of any harm, continued upon his journey to fight for the justice he believed was inevitable. The secon
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Approximate Word count = 1120
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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