Themes
As critic Pierre A. Walker notes, when Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature was thematic unity, and one of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion. The structure of the text, which resembles a series of short stories, is not chronological but rather thematic. Walker believes that Angelou succeeded in emphasizing identity, racism, rape, and literacy, despite the narrative's episodic quality. As Hagen states, she structures the book into three parts: arrival, sojourn, and departure, both geographically and psychologically.
Read more about this topic: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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