Character Analysis Essay: “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver

by



Character Analysis Essay: “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Introduction

Barbara Kingsolver is the scribe of numerous well-written pieces of publications encompassing The Poisonwood Bible. This innovative discovers the attractiveness and hardships that live in the Belgian Congo in 1959. Told by the wife and four daughters of a furious Baptist, Nathan Price, Kingsolver apparently captures the truths this family and mission went through throughout their proceed to the Congo. The four daughters were increased in Atlanta Georgia in the 1950's thus going into the Congo with preconceived racial beliefs, and a very distinct way of life than they would shortly experience. Throughout The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver discovers the significance and influence of faith, and a belief founded on your own personal beliefs.

 

Discussion

Nathan Price is a Baptist disciple who takes his family into the heart of Africa in an effort to convert the native peoples to Christianity. He is a solid man, partially from an experience in World War II that leaves him ridden with guilt. He devotes the rest of his life to serving a vengeful God and it is this that leads him to sacrifice his life and his family to the jungles of Africa. As in Africa, though, Nathan finds that his view of God clashes intensely with the traditions of the native Congolese culture. Still, he feels it is his duty to not only proselytizes, but also to rid the natives of their unprincipled rituals plus replace them with a rigid belief in a Christian God.

The title The Poisonwood Bible positions Nathan Price's constant mispronunciation of the word Bängala. His frequent utilization of the phrase “Tata Jesus is Bängala,” or poisonwood, is juxtaposed with its intended “Tata Jesus is Bangala”—valuable or dear one. Is Kingsolver's title revealing an underlying criticism of Christianity? One idea she does present is a new meaning or view of the Bible; her novel itself becomes a kind of Bible of memoirs for the family, each person interpreting life in their own way. Kingsolver verifies reality to be the bible to which she assigns, since real life is preferred to the twisted translations of the real Bible.

Orleanna Price, the wife and mother, of this labouring family is a very dependable woman, lacking some of the more powerful devout background of which her married man possesses. Orleanna, labours with the hardships of every day life; toting and disinfecting the family's water, scrambling to make finishes rendezvous and seeking to defend her family from the myriad terrors of the bush. Orleanna values irony to recount the early days of her marriage. As she recounts them, the days when there was still room for laughing out blaring in her husband's evangelical calling, before her pregnancies humilitated him, before he returned from World War II a distinct man, a man who designed ''to save more spirits than had perished on the street from Bataan.'' Her married man, Nathan Price, had got away those miseries simply by ...