Dark Sons Literary Elements

Verse Novel/Coming of Age/Historical Fiction

Gerar, a town mentioned in the Book of Genesis during that particular era and Brooklyn, NY in the present day.

The story set in the Biblica era is narrated through a series of poems by Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic religions. The story set in modern times is narrated through a series of poems by an African American teenage boy named Sam.

Since Sam’s story is constructed to parallel Ishmael as tales told by firstborn sons who feel betrayed by their fathers, the tone of the entire book is one of tense emotional anxiety resulting from extremely personal and subjective reactions to perceived slights. The mood varies according to the specific emotional tenor this overwhelming sense of grievance is capable of stimulating, which essentially covers everything from anger to tenderness, from shame and empathy, from joy to despondency.

Protagonists: Ishmael and Sam. Antagonists: Ismael’s and Sam’s fathers.

The major conflict in both stories is the arrival of new sons the fathers create with women other than the mothers of Ishmael of Sam and the subsequent perception by both firstborn sons of being displaced from their familial roles.

The story comes to a climax with Sam reconciling with his anger toward his father and, as the result of prayer, arriving at the realization that forgiveness is a better choice than bitterness. In this state of mind, his daily reading of the Bible finally brings him to the story of Ishmael who recognizes as his spiritual brother linked across history and the shared experience of having fathers who ripped out the hearts of their firstborn songs.

The biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and the conception of Isaac that is retold by Ishmael in Book One foreshadows the parallel events in Book Two in which Sam relates the story of the arrival of his half-brother David whom Sam’s father conceived with a woman other than Sam’s mother.

“I stare through the window / at the guy loading his car / for the move from Brooklyn to Manhattan” is an understated way of describing a family being ripped apart and a son left emotionally devastated by the breakup of his parents' marriage.

An ironic allusion to the happily-ever-after schematic of fairy tales is how Sam conveys the physical attributes of the woman with whom his father has begun a new life with a new son: “Why this twenty-five-year-old /Snow White, / all light eyed / and tousled tresses?”

Basketball imagery permeates the language Sam chooses to tell his story in a way that conveys how the game was something that he and his father bonded over and that has become notably absent in the wake of his father’s moving out. The title of one of his poems is “A Hoop and a Prayer” and one of his final poems is about his practicing shots from the free-throw line. Most powerful of all, however, is the incorporation of basketball imagery into a metaphor describing the consequences of his father’s absence: “Then it hits me. Again. / How Dad jammed a needle / into the thin roundness / of our family / and let out all the air.”

Despite feeling an intense resentment toward his father, Ishmael finds himself paradoxically drawn to Isaac with an equally intense feeling of love in spite of feelings of being usurped from his rightful place position of inheritance: “I confess, I often find myself / wound round the finger / of the little brother / who makes me second best.”

Parallelism is the defining literary device by which Sam describes the life of a child of divorce forced by circumstances into possessing two of everything: “Two houses, /two beds, / two dressers, / two closets, / two sets of rooms / and rules”

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