Part I. Passages: Select two of the quotations from the novel that appear below and use each
quotation as the springboard for an essay of about 300 words. Explain the significance of the
brief group of sentences in the context of the whole novel. Explain the context of the quotation
and connect it to as many aspects of the novel’s plot, narrative, and thematic elements that you
can within the bounds of a short essay. (20 points each)
1. And this became Florence’s deep ambition: to walk out one morning through the cabin door,
never to return. Her father, whom she scarcely remembered, had departed that way one morning
not many months after the birth of Gabriel.
2. “Praise the Lord,” said his father. He did not move to touch him, did not kiss him, did not
smile. They stood before each other in silence, while the saints rejoiced; and John struggled to
speak the authoritative, the living word that would conquer the great division between his father
and himself. But it did not come, the living word; in silence something died in John and
something came alive. It came to him that he must testify . . .
3. “You see?” came now from his father. “It was white folks, some of them white folks you like
so much that tried to cut your brother’s throat.”
John thought, with immediate anger and with a curious contempt for his father’s inexactness, that
only a blind man, however white, could possibly have been aiming at Roy’s throat . . .
4. Then Richard shouted, “But I wasn’t there! Look at me, goddammit – I wasn’t there!”
“You black bastards,” the man said, looking at him, “you’re all the same.”
5. Then John saw the Lord – for a moment only; and the darkness, for a moment only, wa filled
with light he could not bear. Then, in a moment, he was set free; his tears sprang as from a
fountain; his heart, like a fountain of waters, burst.
Part II. Essay: Select one the topics below and develop it into an essay of about 400 words. (30
points)
6. Gabriel in “Go Tell It on the Mountain” appears to have delusions of grandeur, but reality
keeps smacking him down. He thinks of his son Roy as his true heir, and he thinks of John as an
illegitimate interloper. His imagination alludes to the story in the Bible of Abraham’s sons Isaac
and Ishmael. How does what is really going on in his world completely upset Gabriel’s hopes
and dreams? What is Roy like and what is John like?
7. There is a tension in Baldwin’s novel between the Southern origins of most of the characters
and the North (Harlem, New York) where most of them end up. In the North of the United
States , Blacks are urban people; but most African Americans who come in the early to midtwentieth
century to the North are rural people. How does this dislocation affect the characters
in “Go Tell It on the Mountain”?
8. The African-American spiritual hymn that James Baldwin uses for the title of his novel is
often considered a Christmas song. It begins, “Go tell it on the mountain/ Over the hills and
everywhere/ Go tell it on the mountain/ That Jesus Christ is born!” How does the theme of a
new birth and the arrival of a savior relate to the events and the theme in the novel? Reading Link-http://www.wenovel.com/book/204.html