The Beautiful Struggle

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2008

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Everyday Life as Myth

One of the key themes in The Beautiful Struggle is the depiction of the banal realities of Coates's upbringing as tales of mythic proportion. More broadly, Coates depicts the struggle of the young African American male in the 1980s as a kind of mythical bildungsroman, or coming of age story. He paints what have historically been represented in the mainstream media as petty disputes between young men of color as tales of vengeance, honor, and the search for meaning.

Coates threads references to epic literature and his beloved science fiction tales throughout the book, positioning himself as the underdog, with his father as the knight in shining armor and his brother Big Bill as the troubled, but fierce, gladiator. All three of these characters, are antiheroes to an extent, and it is their struggles with their internal and external worlds that further highlight Coates’s memoir as a kind of Odyssey of black young adulthood in 1980s Baltimore. Like Odysseus, Coates’s heroes are flawed, and their experiences with the tumultuous outside world lead to internal shifts and moral lessons within.

Furthermore, Coates’s writing style upholds the mythic proportions of his bildungsroman. He describes schoolyard brawls with vivid detail and uses bold declarative language to illustrate his father’s character. His action-driven language describing NationHouse’s djembe performances brings in an element of the fantastical, literally bringing magic to life, as in an Arthurian tale. His inclusion of a map and family tree at the beginning of the book mirrors tropes in epic fantasy narratives.

Black Culture as Liberation

Another key theme in The Beautiful Struggle is the depiction of black culture as a liberating force in the face of an oppressive white American society built to keep African Americans down. These oppressive forces that Coates alludes to (sometimes obliquely) include gun violence, socioeconomic difference, geographic segregation, and lack of educational access. For Coates, his father, his community at NationHouse, and even at times Big Bill, black cultural production represents the only liberating force in their lives. These cultural productions include ancient African literature (embraced by Coates’s father), the djembe, “the New York noise” (101), basketball, raps by Chuck D, James Baldwin’s writings, stories of the Black Panthers, and more. All of these cultural products are, at some point throughout the book, outlets for Coates’s characters to escape the conditions of their everyday lives. They are part of Consciousness, or the awareness of the reality of the black struggle and the necessity of revolution. It is worth pointing out that while Coates eventually succeeds academically, likely reading texts that are part of a white Western canon of cultural production, he never cites these texts as inspiring forces. White cultural products are conspicuously missing from the book, in what is surely Coates’s attempt to rewrite the narrative of cultural value. In producing his memoir at all, Coates is contributing to the pantheon of black literature pointing toward black liberation.

Family as a Relational Force

Coates’s book presents his familial figures as the people against which he makes his own life choices. His father is a “Conscious Man,” against which he initially rebels, preferring to go into the fantastical worlds of the science fiction stories he so dearly loves. His brother Big Bill has the “Knowledge,” succeeding on the streets with a gun in tow, playing basketball, making music, and wooing all the girls he sets his sights on, whereas Coates cannot seem to understand these worlds and initially does not attempt to participate in them. Yet, over the course of his upbringing, Coates eventually embraces the worlds of both his father and his brother but does it in his own way and according to his own timeline. In this way, his family relationships are the key determining factors in his worldview, something he is able to reflect upon in the present moment but did not necessarily realize as it was happening.