A Gathering of Old Men Analysis

Out at the Marshall Plantation and Deep in Louisiana, 1970s Forget what you might be thinking about Mardis Gras beads and gators, or jambalaya and crawfish pie. Gaines might be taking us deep in...

First-Person (Peripheral Narrator) + First-Person (Central Narrator) From the time we're with Snookum when he sees Beau's body out in front of Mathu's house, to that last bitter-sweet second whe...

Twentieth-Century Realism When literary folks talk about Realism, they're usually talking about stuff from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that gives you an up-close and personal lo...

Raise Your Right Hand and… Keep it Simple, Honest, and To the Point The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—that's what you're expected to tell if you're ever a witness testify...

Direct and Down to Earth Most of the characters you meet in Gaines's novel are simple, salt-of-the-earth type folks who think that a person is only as good as their word and that there's no need...

In the same kind of way that a movie about Superman is going to be called Superman, it makes sense that A Gathering of Old Men is called A Gathering of Old Men because that's what the novel is focu...

By the time the novel ends, you've spent so much time with the folks out at Marshall that you can probably see "the bushes and weeds," that grow "so tall that the road […] seems no wider than a k...

As far as the language goes, it's not like you're trying to read The Odyssey in the original Greek when you pick up A Gathering of Old Men. Still, there are times when Gaines takes you so far int...

Exposition (Initial Situation) Ding Dong, the Bad Guy's Dead  If Beau Boutan hadn't been such an awful human being, maybe he could have avoided getting shot. But it just so happens that he...

Talk about major changes. In an earlier version of the novel, the central character was going to be a cousin of Candy's that also happened to be of mixed ancestry. Gaines changed his mind when he r...

Nobody takes their clothes off and nobody has a baby. The only birds and bees that you'll find in Gaines's novel are the ones that might be flying around near Marshall Plantation. Even actual b...

Literary and Philosophical References William Faulkner: The big daddy of the literature of the American South, Faulkner's novels—like As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury—often tell storie...