Langston Hughes is a classic American author whose writing style is perhaps one of the most malleable styles in the history of American literature. In the first place, he is among the exclusive echelon of writers to oscillate in his works between poetry and prose, being so well accomplished in both forms. Beyond this, however, he quite often modifies his style in one area or another in order to make a formal point; that is, the form and style of his writing is usually different from piece to piece because his writing style is always a tool used to create a pattern that communicates some essential substance to the purpose of the work. Two stories from The Ways of White Folks more than adequately illustrate how his writing style can transform from one work to the next, and they also highlight how Hughes uses these stylistic shifts. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Langston Hughes writes "Red-Headed Baby" about a white sailor named Clarence who sails into the harbor of a southern black town and eyes a black girl named Betsy with whom he once had relationships sexual. He intends to sleep with her again, but he discovers in the girl a two-year-old child who has the same red hair as him. He finds himself unable to realize that he has a colored son, so rather than having sex with Betsy as he had originally planned, he leaves in a hurry. The narrative style is very poetic prose, and it is important to note that it is written differently from much of Hughes's narration. It is full of incomplete sentences that convey complete thoughts, and the reader is deliberately led to realize that the narration is, more or less, representative of Clarence's train of thought. As the protagonist of the story, Clarence shapes the main point of view of the text, recounting his thoughts and even presumably speaking out loud to himself, expressing some of those thoughts. This causes his narrative voice to be reflected in his dialogue. The importance of this narrative style is that Hughes uses the punctuation of these complete thoughts to show the reader the different levels of Clarence's anxiety. The more anxious he becomes, the more these thoughts begin to blur together. The narrative structure uses a series of repeated sentences, for example when he discovers the child and recognizes it as unquestionably his. The narration also becomes more poetic as certain allusions Clarence makes in his mind become like refrains because they recur more than once (e.g. "googly-eyed dolls you hit with a ball at the fair county” or “three shots for a quarter like a loaded doll”). Throughout the story, Clarence's view characterizes black people as subhuman and lowly. He uses what he sees about a person's outward appearance as a measure of their worth. The visual perception of the color of a person's skin devalues ​​them in Clarence's point of view. It is therefore paradoxical that the boy, also named Clarence, is described by his great-aunt as blind, not because he cannot see, but because he has no vision. importance on what he sees. Clarence also dominates the text with his own perspective by narrating in such depth. His voice dominates not only the narration but also the dialogue, and the majority of the text is in his voice; the few words spoken by Betsy and the Old Woman are filtered through Clarence's narrative voice to the extent that Hughes never introduces quotations with "Betsy said" or "the Old Woman replied,” meaning that it completely shapes the narrative. It establishes the value system of human worth. It is equally ironic that his namesake never speaks and is described as deaf. Hughes seems to suggest that all of the senses that Clarence abuses are absent in his son. Hughes presents the implicit black/white binary, but he also presents an explicit red/yellow opposition. Betsy is an interracial child herself, mixed with Black and White, but the reader only knows that the colored part of her is black because Clarence refers to Betsy, her aunt, and everyone in town as "niggers." In other words, the term Black is never actually used; instead, she is constantly referred to as "yellow". The derogatory slur, nigger, is derived from the word negro, which specifically means black, so in a literal sense it is contradictory that Betsy is called nigger and yellow, as opposed to black, which speaks to the unfairness of the rules of the Whites. on the race. The system they established essentially referred to a person as black for having a noticeable trace of black in them, even if they were whiter than black, as if to suggest that white ethnicity had been tainted and could not no longer be called white. This is the racist logic behind terms like mulatto, quadroon and octoroon. In “A Good Job Gone,” Hughes writes from the perspective of a young African-American boy who works as a servant for a wealthy white man named Mr. Lloyd. . The young boy narrates the story, recounting his experience to another boy. He explains that it was the best paying job he ever had. Mr. Lloyd paid him twenty dollars a week and often slipped him five for miscellaneous tasks or when he was gone for several days, and more importantly, Mr. Lloyd had no qualms with blacks, which suited him well treat the narrator. The comments about white people stem from Mr. Lloyd's rarity. He is a peculiar white man in that his wife is paralyzed and so he cannot have sex with her. He is also a depressed man who deals with his depression by drinking and becoming feminine. But even more than the depression, the fact that Mr. Lloyd loses his sanity after the heartbreak he experiences with what the narrator calls a Jane from Harlem named Pauline is fraught with meaning, suggesting that he was on the verge of the reason from the beginning. . The implication is that only a crazy white man could be so comfortable around black people, and after reading about his loss of sanity, the reader is left to retrospectively question the narrator's comments about M's fair treatment. Lloyd referred to him as no longer proof that he was a good man, but rather a man so desperate for companionship that he could not afford to exclude blacks. Perhaps the most interesting binary opposition in the text is that of Riverside Drive/Harlem. The story establishes these two locations as antitheses of each other, and this opposition of settings entirely facilitates the story. The majority of the story takes place in Riverside Drive where Mr. Lloyd lives since the narrator is almost always there to maintain Mr. Lloyd's house even when Mr. Lloyd is gone, so Riverside Drive is present for most of the text while Harlem is absent. except for one scene in which Mr. Lloyd finds Pauline with her colorful lover. This adds presence/absence as an associated binary opposition. Additionally, due to Mr. Lloyd's relentless feminization, another binary opposition that works in tandem with these is that of man/woman. Finally, there is the obvious White/Black binary because of the importance of Mr. Lloyd's particular acceptance of blacks as white men. In each of..