Question

Explain how the narrator's characterization of himself is designed to convey his "message" of self-improvement. Include four examples from the passage to support your answer. Write your answer in the box below.

Answer 1

From The Autobiography of Malcolm X
[NOTE: Malcolm X was born in 1925. As a young man, he spent six years in prison before
becoming a civil rights leader. He was assassinated in 1965.]
1 I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to
learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve
my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both
ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets
and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.
2 I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never
realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn.
Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.
3 In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything
printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.
4 I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d
written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.
5 I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to
realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I
never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember
what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meaning I didn’t
remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark”
springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared,
burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its
tongue as an anteater does for ants.
6 I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the
same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also
learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is
like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a
whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what
eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much
practice helped me pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my
tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I
wrote a million words.
7 I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first
time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was
saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that
opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free
moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You
couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between . . . my
correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading of
books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact,
up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.