Three ways of storytelling

Rose’s story was more akin to that of Malcolm X’s in that it felt like a more vibrant story. He fleshed out the characters by explaining personality rather than hard facts about them like in Franklins. One of the things though that I really liked about Rose’s essay was how well the environment was backfilled with characters. Strictly speaking it was not necessary for him to go into such detail about the different teachers as they were not directly related to the quote that he got from Ken Harvey, the title of the essay. More interesting than that was the fact that the teacher of the religion class was not called out as having a name or personality.

Even though Rose did not go into detail about this particular teacher I feel that it did not harm the story any. He described enough of the teachers so that the reader could get a feeling for how the system had delegated him to a lesser track and started planting this notion of all of them being unworthy or sub-par in some way. All of this leads to driving Harvey’s statement home because the reader can get a taste of what these kids went though.

While I personally found all three stories to be interesting I felt that Rose’s was the most filled out and was painted in the most detail. He gave the audience the set to work with filling in each corner and fleshing out the various characters. The other two were not tied as heavily to one location so they presumably did not see it necessary to flesh out all of the details.