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Similes
Troubled About My Soul
Explanation and Analysis:
Tish is the first-person narrator of If Beale Street Could Talk, so Tish's voice defines the style of the novel. She is vivacious, funny, often long-winded, and the prose of her narration seemingly replicates her thoughts. In this passage, Tish follows a thought though to its conclusion, and the reader experiences it with her:
The baby cannot get here without me. And, while I may have known this, in one way, a little while ago, now the baby knows it, and tells me that while it will certainly be worse, once it leaves the water, what gets worse can also get better. It will be in the water for a while yet: but it is preparing itself for a transformation. And so must I.
These sorts of long-running sentences are common in the novel. The style, reflecting Tish's personality, is energetic, fast-moving, and conversational. There is little in the way of complicated diction or allusions. Tish tells the story quite directly, creating a direct prose style.
Another important aspect of the style is that the novel uses, in a limited way, African American Vernacular English when rendering the speech of Black characters. These uses include Tish referring to Sharon as "Mama" and Fonny using "us" often to refer to himself (e.g., "Give us a kiss"). Baldwin also emulates Black speaking patterns and rhythms, especially those of New Yorkers, using punctuation and italics. For example, here Baldwin represents Daniel's particular speaking style as he describes why he went to jail: "They said—they still say—stole a car. Man, I can't even drive a car, and I tried to make my lawyer—but he was really their lawyer, dig, he worked for the city—prove that, but he didn't." But in general Baldwin does not use any significant spelling changes to convey dialect for Tish or any of the other Black characters in the novel, in a notable contrast to other authors of African American literature at the time. (Similarly, Baldwin records the speech of Victoria Rogers, who is described as having a Spanish accent, in plain English.) In this way, Baldwin foregrounds Black characters and life and does not attempt to make them seem "other" because of their way of speaking.
