Celie's Progression and the Epistolary Format in The Color Purple

The format of The Color Purple, written entirely in letters, seems here to serve a more directly personal narration by the speaker, Celie. For most of the novel the letters are consisted of Celie’s letters to God. Through the letters sent, the reader is able to immediately and boldly recognize the kind of life Celie has. These “written” passages pretty much equate to a diary, already then giving off a confessional, private tone of sorts. But what also makes these letters is Celie’s voice. With this epistolary format, the reader can see that the tragic occurrences in Celie’s childhood have an added weight being that her approach to these situations is so downplayed, frightened yet nonchalant almost, convinced of the happenstance of her life. And though you don’t get the primary perspectives of the other characters like Albert and Shug, Celie’s character is somewhat synonymous to a blank slate, in that the way she describes their actions and associates them directly to their personalities causes a clearer interpretation of the other characters moreso than most first-person narrators.
Also, the novel’s format presents an immediate display of Celie’s growth as a character, given that the progression is addressed by herself. In the beginning letters of the book, the passages are short, blunt, to-the-point as she describes her horrid living experiences: “He act like he can’t stand me no more. Say I’m evil an always up to no good. He took my other little baby, a boy this time. But I don’t think he kilt it. I think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello.” As the pages go on, the letters get longer and longer, and we also see more insight into her sister Nettie; with her as with Shug, the reader easily gets a sense of how they are, and because one knows that Celie cares very deeply for these characters, one can better see the motives behind their actions in the way she writes about them. Because Celie’s maturity rested on her own shoulders, there’s less of a front and defensiveness and bias that comes with more and more contemporary first-person narratives (in fact, her moral basis is a most general and basically instinctive sense of right and wrong, given that no one else was there to guide her, furthering her, as I would claim, near-objective presence in the novel). And when Celie changes the recipient of her letters to Nettie, the questionably empty void of her personality begins to shift, the reader knows even more into Celie’s mind, and more and more she becomes less a mere product of her environment. For instance, towards the end when Shug leaves Celie and Albert for a nineteen year-old, of all people, it’s those latter two that end up consoling each other over their loss. Celie says, “Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars.” And by the end of the novel when Nettie and the rest of Celie’s family arrive from Africa, one can see the happy ending, but this is almost tragic in itself, one can see Celie’s transformation (“Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.”), from a tortured childhood to Celie receiving what each person deserves in the least.

Legacy, History & Reception of The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation came to prominence in the public eye during the 1950s, representing a used, and worn out offspring, the evidence of repression and the choices of America’s leaders leading up to the Great Depression and into World War II seen in the character of the young adults who survived these major historical events since youth. It was Jack Kerouac who coined the term, the label for those like him who did not accept their leaders, the social stigmas of the time, and did not accept the dependency on consumerism that was so emphasized during the time period. Before Kerouac’s conversation with John Clellon Holmes where he first referenced the term “beat generation,” he gives an account of talking to some hipsters in Times Sqaure, who ended up inspiring him to remember the term: “One of them, Huncke of Chicago, came up to me and said, ‘Man, I’m beat.’ I knew right away what he meant somehow.... And so when Huncke...said ‘I’m beat’ with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes...it was a new language...[and] couldn’t be a more economical term to mean so many things” (Tamony 275).
With works like Kerouac’s On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the Beat generation poets were launched, and their anti-materialistic values and preachings surely dictated and persuaded the cultural movement of the Sixties and Seventies, for when the Beats first emerged in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the controversial values the Beats advocated, but this soon lead to the countercultures of the Sixties. With a change in terminology from “beat” to “hippie,” also came a split in the stances held by the Beat poets. While Jack Kerouac criticized the multiple protest movements (“an excuse for spitefulness”), Allen Ginsberg became directly involved with anti-war protests and became an activist himself, channeling his inspiration through poetry. Reflecting on the Sixties’ counterculture twenty years later, Ginsberg believed that what remained as a legacy from the period was “a permanent change in awareness; remember, the notion of Armageddon apocalypse before the Sixties was considered eccentric, whereas now as a possibility it’s a universal awareness.... I think there was a glimpse of possibility of survival of the planet, partly through spirit, partly through imagination and poetry, partly through psychedelic insight” (Ginsberg 463).
By the time the Sixties and the Seventies’ hippie movement, survivors of the poets, like Allen Ginsberg (Kerouac died of alcohol poisoning in 1969), still continued their literary work, but as for what the Beat Generation caused and represented, I believe was fate; a rejection which led to movements and near-revolution, and an essential part of the Fifties and Sixties with their new approach to literature and understanding human thought. They emphasized free expression, a unfortunately controversial stance, that inspired their affluence for non-comformity.



Ginsberg, Allen. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-96. New York: Perennial, 2002. Print.

Tamony, Peter. "Beat Generation: Beat: Beatniks." Western Folklore 28.4 (1969): 274-277. Web. 16 Oct 2009.