Banjo: A Story Without A Plot Analysis

Banjo: A Story without a Plot by Claude McKay, is a novel with many different stories of being a colored vagabond during the 1920s. The novel is written in three separate parts, with each chapter depicting a different story. Banjo, a colored vagabond, drifts from place to place, while enjoying the freedom of not being tied down anywhere. Banjo has trouble finding what he truly wishes to do, traveling without a plan, or plot. When his friend, Ray, joins the group, he shows Banjo how to find his way and happiness. One of Claude McKay’s central theme’s throughout his many poems and novels, is that black’s should have a high regard for their heritage. Adam Ewing, in “Lying Up a Nation: Zora Neale Hurston and the Local Uses of Diaspora”, discusses …show more content…
Adam Ewing references Michelle Ann Stephens in “Lying Up a Nation: Zora Neale Hurston and the Local Uses of Diaspora”, “the heroes of both Home to Harlem and Banjo “move freely throughout the diaspora, unattached and undomesticated” because of what they are willing to leave behind, namely the aspirations of “women of color” and the obligations of home and community.”(Ewing). Banjo and his friends, like Ray, aren’t tied down to one place. They are willing to move freely from place to place because they are still searching for their so called “home”. They can’t help, but to think that they don’t belong in Marseilles because they don’t want to get used to the discrimination. One of the lines from Banjo mentioned before, “I heah that officer call you all ‘a damned lot a disgusting niggers,’ and I don’t want no gitting used to that.”(pg 42), is a good enough reason for Banjo wanting to leave Marseilles because he refuses to accept the discrimination against the …show more content…
Ray says to Goosey, “Ise a true-blue traveling bohn nigger and I know life, and I knows how to take it nacheral. I fight when I got to and I works when I must and I lays off when I feel lazy, and I loves all the time becausen the honey-pot a life is mah middle name.”(pg 305). When Ray references his middle name as being the honey-pot of life, he was saying he enjoys traveling, it’s sweet in this sense. It’s as though if he wasn’t traveling, Ray would be incomplete in some ways. On the following page, Jake asks Ray when they’ll be coming back to visit, and Ray replies, “When the train puts me off. I like this rolling along, stopping anywhere I’m put off or thrown off. Like Banjo.”(pg 306). The group doesn’t understand, but Ray just feels that he is naturally born vagabond. In terms of the novel, he enjoys being plotless. Wherever his travels take him, he will go. As Ray and Banjo, were roaming the boat, Ray realized that, “From these boys he could learn how to live-how to exist as a black boy in a white world and rid his conscience of the used-up hussy of white-morality.”(pg 322). Throughout the novel, Ray was slowly losing hope about all the discrimination against the blacks, but realized from this new voyage, that there still might be hope.

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