Sounder Literary Elements

Young adult novel

The story takes place in a rural area of an unidentified southern state during the late 1800’s some time after the abolition of slavery. The lack of specificity connects to the lack of names for the characters as a means of establishing them as universal figures rather than limiting their experiences to just one area.

The story is conveyed through third-person point-of-view with a perspective focusing mostly on the young boy of the family’s thoughts, fears, desires and ambitions.

The mood is serious with a bleakness at times that mirrors the landscape. Tonal shifts vary considerably so that some scenes reveal the depression of the circumstances of the characters while others introduces hope and optimism for a better future while still others almost give into rage at the inequality and unfairness of the events.

Protagonist: the boy. Antagonist: systemic and institutionalized racism and discrimination which seeks to limit any opportunity for improving his circumstances significantly over that experienced by his parents.

The conflict comes to a head when the white law enforcement authorities arrest the father for theft which subsequently leads to the disappearance of the family’s beloved hound dog. This action is part of a broader and long-simmering conflict the father must face between feeding his family or obeying the laws of a legal system which systemically works toward limiting that very opportunity.

The climax of the novel is twofold. The boy is offered the wildly unexpected chance to pursue his dream of an education and—perhaps even more unlikely—the father and Sounder both return to the family.

The concluding lines of the very first chapter foreshadow one-half of that dual climax as the boy thinks to himself: “One day I will learn to read.”

Understatement infuses the power of the description of the other climax. The very indication that the family is to be fully reunited at long last relies on the opposite of foreshadowing, as it recalls descriptions earlier of the difficulty in making out details of anyone in the distance approaching or leaving the cabin: “A lone figure came on the landscape as a speck and slowly grew into a ripply form through the heat waves.”

Thinking Sounder dead, the boy muses over the possibility of bringing the dog back to life in an allusion to one of the most famous stories of the New Testament:” Maybe if she laid him on the porch and put some soft rags under him tonight, he might rise from the dead, like Lazarus did in a meetin’-house story.”

The boy’s recognition of both the fact that he will be a perpetual underdog in society, but that history tells us sometimes the underdog wins against even the most overwhelming of foes is conveyed through Biblical imagery as well. It is no mere coincidence that the two biggest heroes of the bible are two of its biggest underdogs who beat the odds: “if his mother wasn’t sad, with her lips stretched thin, she would stop humming and tell about David the boy, or King David. If she felt good and started long enough before bedtime, he would hear about Joseph the slave-boy, Joseph in prison, Joseph the dreamer, and Joseph the Big Man in Egypt.”

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An unusually imaginative utilization of metonymy occurs when the boy brings a cake to the jail for his father to eat only to watch with stunned outrage as the jailer purposely destroys the treat with his hands under the pretense that it could contain a file to be used for escape. “Part of the cake fell to the floor; it was only a box of crumbs now” becomes at that moment another addition to the universalizing of the family’s story as it stands as a metonymic symbol of blacks in the south inherently being expected to get by just crumbs left for them by white society. `

Despite being a book in which the only character with a name is a dog, the most creative use of personification may actually be one that gives human attributes not to an animal, but an invisible force of nature: “The boy listened to the wind. He could hear the mighty roaring. He thought he heard the voice of David and the tramping of many feet. He wasn’t afraid with David near.”