I know why the caged bird sings summary of the characters and everything, please.?

Question

I know why the caged bird sings summary of the characters and everything, please.?

Answer 1

The bestselling first volume of Maya Angelou's serial autobiography inaugurated a new era of African American women's writing. Published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings contains many of the themes that would become central to feminist theory and practice in the 1980s. Taken from the first verse of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “Sympathy”, the title articulates the woman writer's empowering recognition of her ability to sing her own song despite the cultural odds against her. “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Angelou writes. “It is an unnecessary insult.”

Set mostly in Stamps, Arkansas, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings traces the events in the lives of Marguerite Johnson and her brother, Bailey, who are raised by their grandmother, Momma Henderson, the owner of a general store, and their crippled Uncle Willie. Angelou paints a vast historical fresco of life in the segregated South and in the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco during the 1930s and early 1940s. Part autobiography, part fictional picaresque narrative, part social history and commentary, this story confers an exemplary quality to the experiences of the narrator whose childhood is spent shuttling back and forth between rural and urban America. She undergoes the loss of innocence characteristic of the protagonist of picaresque tales. In St. Louis, she is raped at the age of eight by her mother's boyfriend, and having denounced him, blames herself for his murder. She loses the ability to speak until her return to Stamps, where a friend, Mrs. Flowers, inspires her to rediscover the beauty of the “human voice.” Later she moves to California, and after graduating from high school at the age of seventeen, she gives birth to a son. The book begins and ends with intense physical experiences that teach the narrator that she can trust her body, that it is a source of power and knowledge rather than the liability that her racist and sexist society dictates.

George E. Kent has shown that there are two main areas of African American life that give depth to the narrative. The grandmother represents the religious influence and the gospel tradition, and the mother, “the blues-street” tradition, the fast life. Both elements of the black vernacular inform the development of the story, and show the protagonist's complex relationship to the conflicting yet complementary influences that shape her life story. A third element consists in the vast intertextual network of literary allusions and references that Angelou uses. Her narrator is an avid reader who is as familiar with Shakespeare and Moliere, Defoe, Brontë, and Dickens as with Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Frederick Douglass. She situates her storytelling within a specifically literary context, and develops a double-voiced message, directed toward both a white audience and the black community. This strategy is characteristic of the genre of the slave narrative. Angelou builds upon and transforms the major tropes that define the tradition of African American letters, and she does so, as Sidonie A. Smith has argued, with a keen sense of style, as well as a rich use of poetic idioms and idiosyncratic vocabulary.

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Answer 2

Summary of characters:

Granny is a lovable old lady who has outlived all her friends and family.  Her only remaining joy is her pet canary.

Sylvester is a sly predator, always looking to destroy Granny's happiness.

Tweety is unable to express true emotions because of his speech impediment.