How Does Coates Use Repetition In A Letter To My Nephew

In James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew,” he writes a letter to his nephew James about racism. Baldwin, in short, says that white people are innocent because they do not know any better and to love them even though they do not deserve it. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” he writes a letter to his son about racism. In Coates’s letter he basically tells his son what it is like to live in an African Americans body. Both of these authors are writing letters to young men in their families, but Baldwin uses paradoxes to reach his audiences and Coates uses repetition. “A Letter to My Nephew,” by James Baldwin has an explicit audience of his nephew James, but after reading and analyzing his work you come to find out the audience is more broad. This is the same way with Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” his explicit audience is his son but after reading you can find the implied audience in both articles. The implied audience that both authors were trying to reach are …show more content…
On in particular device that he uses many times is repetition. In example of repetition is in paragraph eleven, he uses the word dream seven times in nine sentences. In this paragraph, he is talking about the American dream. One sentence that had the word dream in it is, “But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies” (Coates). That sentence is saying that the American dream does not exist for everyone and Coates is referring to slavery when he says, “the dream rests on our backs.” Another example of repetition is in paragraph fourteen, Coates uses the word afraid many times in that paragraph to prove the point that all African Americans live in deep seeded fear of not actually being in control of their lives, and not being able to achieve as much as white people because of their skin