The Poisonwood Bible Analysis

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a revolutionary novel, which was published at the end of the twentieth century. It is the first of its kind through the marvelous tactic of using first person among five different narrators, namely Orleanna, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May Price, as well as the use of historical fiction to clearly introduce the author’s political viewpoints through the voices of the characters. By these unique methods, Kingsolver’s work quickly rose to popularity.
The story is told through the eyes of the women in the Price family, who are taken on a missionary trip to the Congo by the husband and father of the family, Nathan Price. They endure much hardship, otherwise known as lack of their accustomed luxuries, …show more content…
She uses the time in history during which the Congo attempted to claim its independence from the tyrannical Belgian rule in 1960, and the war that ensued, followed by another dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko. As stated above, her characters are on an evangelical mission in the Congo when this sequence of catastrophes occurs in the novel. It is this change of events which give the author a platform for stressing her perspective. One of her viewpoints is that the Africans have been horribly mistreated and taken advantage of throughout history, including by the United States who played a serious hand in the war and following dictatorship in the Congo. An example of the mistreatment of the African people is found in one of Ruth May’s chapter, in which she is listening to a conversation between her father and a doctor who is bandaging her broken arm, “Without looking up from my arm, the doctor said, ‘We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands” (Kingsolver 121). Another is that the people of the West, namely Americans, are truly ignorant of the lifestyle and hardships of the African people, to whom every day is a struggle for the basic necessities of life. This is demonstrated time and time again by Rachel, as in the following statement, in which she voices her opinion of a Congolese feast, “Oh, I got the picture, right there, our first night in Africa. I sat breathing through my nose, holding in my mouth the pure, awful flavor of something on fire and bristle of stiff hairs from the burnt hide of a dead goat. I shut my eyes tight, but even so, the tears ran down. I wept for the sins of all who had brought my family to this dread dark shore,” (Kingsolver 29). Little does Rachel realize or

Show More

Poisonwood Bible Analysis