"Salvage the Bones" Summarized & Analyzed

By Students' Academy

“Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward was first published in 2011. The book won the National Book Award for Fiction in the same year. At the centre of the novel the plight of a working class African American family living in New Orleans is there.

The announcements having been made that Hurricane Katrina is approaching, the family prepares for the disaster. The novel follows the family through the aftermaths of the storm.

The author had lived through the Katrina. When she realized how easily that huge storm had receded from public consciousness, the author decided to write this novel.

"Salvage the Bones" Summarized & Analyzed
Copyright
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Plot Overview
Chapter Three: Major Characters
Chapter Four: Complete Summary
Chapter Five: Critical Analysis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Aug 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370503513

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Salvage the Bones Summarized & Analyzed

Students' Academy

Copyright

Salvage the Bones Summarized & Analyzed

Students' Academy

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Chapter One: Introduction

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward was first published in 2011. The book won the National Book Award for Fiction in the same year. At the centre of the novel the plight of a working class African American family living in New Orleans is there.

The announcements having been made that Hurricane Katrina is approaching, the family prepares for the disaster. The novel follows the family through the aftermaths of the storm.

The author had lived through the Katrina. When she realized how easily that huge storm had receded from public consciousness, the author decided to write this novel.

The novel presents the account of Hurricane Katrina and how a black family is affected in the American South through a first person narrator. A fifteen years old matriarch, Esch, is the narrator.

The story is set in the fictional Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The place is based on the author’s hometown, De Lisle, Mississippi. Most of the events in the novel are inspired by the author’s real-life experiences.

The author presents the account of the time period before the Hurricane Katrina and after the hurricane passed, causing death and destruction.

After the hurricane, those survivors who had refused to evacuate before the disaster were heavily criticized. This angered the author and she decided to inform to the people why those people did not evacuate and why they had resisted evacuation.

Survival and apocalypse are the recurring themes which are extensively explored throughout the novel. The author admitted that her writing is highly influenced by Biblical allegory and Southern Gothic writes such as William Faulkner. Being an African American writer, she often felt that she had been excluded from that literary genre.

During her acceptance speech at the 2011 National Book Awards, Ward said that she understood that she had wanted to write about the experiences of the poor, and the black and the real people of the South so that the culture that marginalized them for so long would see that their stories were as universal, their lives as fraught and lovely and important, as whites.

.Her writing style was highly praised by most of the critics. Parul Sehgal writing for the New York Times said that Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations: where the readers expect violence, she gives them sweetness, and when the readers brace for beauty, she gives them blood."

When the book was published for the first time, most of the reviews were highly positive, and the book was particularly admired by academicians and social scientists and scholars.

Chapter Two: Plot Overview

Salvage the Bones consists of twelve chapters. Each chapter is given to a day either before, during, or after the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Esch, the novel’s first-person narrator, is the central character. She is a fifteen years old girl. She lives in the fictional Bois Sauvage, Mississippi.

As the novel begins, Esch sees the dog named China is giving birth to puppies. The dog belongs to her brother, Skeetah. He is 16 years old. Her brother loves his dog very much, and it is as precious to him as his life.

While the dog is giving birth to its puppies inside the shed, Esch’s father is hammering plywood on the fragile surfaces of the house. She refers him as Daddy. He has come to know that a very bad hurricane is reaching the Gulf Coast. He is doing his best to prepare for the impending disaster.

Daddy warns his son about the approaching hurricane, but Esch’s brothers do not seem to be concerned. Randall is her seventeen years old brother. He is playing basketball with his friends. Her younger brother, Junior, is hiding under the porch.

Esch calls her mother Mama. Her mother had died while giving birth to Junior seven years before. After the death of her mother, Esch found herself in a very uncomfortable environment.

Manny