All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes Literary Analysis

Literary Analysis

In "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes", Maya Angelou tells a story about her trip to Ghana. She uses many literary devices in "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes". These literary devices such as parallelism, polysyndeton, asyndeton, and diction help bring the story together. She also uses imagery in her story. The literary devices that stood out above all were parallelism and diction. These literary devices help convey the meaning of the story. There are a couple of meanings that can be applied to "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes". The one meaning that stood out the most was that sometimes a lie can lead to good events

In the novel "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes", Maya Angelou uses an abundance of parallelism. Parallelism or Parallel Structure is using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. Maya Angelou's use of parallelism can be seen in the quote "white collar workers wearing white knee high socks brushed against market women balancing large baskets on their heads as they proudly swung their wide hips". This use of parallelism helps join her join the ideas of the people. Parallelism also helps describe what these people are doing and what they look like.

Another literary device that Maya Angelou uses in her story "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes", is diction. Diction is the vocabulary or word choice in the story. In "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes", diction helps understand the area and the people who live there. For example the quotes "Go and Come" and "One Nkran has no place to sleep tonight", show Maya Angelou's use of diction. The first quote "Go and Come" shows that there are many customs in Ghana. The second quote "One Nkran has no place to sleep tonight", expresses the same idea as the first quote but also uses Fanti vocabulary to help bring that point across.

In conclusion Maya Angelou uses many literary devices in her story "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes". These literary devices which are parallelism, polysyndeton, asyndeton, and diction and many others, help bring the meaning of the story across. This meaning is that sometimes a lie can lead to good events.