Literary Merit

Literary Merit: The quality shared by all works of fiction that are considered to have aesthetic value. The concept is considered criticized as being subjective since personal taste determine aesthetic value.

-Definition from College Board

To me I feel as though a literary merit is a novel that teaches us a lesson. Remember when we were in elementary school and at the end of the novel there was always a lesson or the moral of the novel? For instance, The Boy Who Cried Wolf--if you lie about needing help and when the time comes when you are in danger, help will not come. Then when we get older we read books like The Lord of the Flies--one still exist even though they were masked but an uncivilized society. We can always take a work of literature and relate back to real life situations that may relate to us.

The novel Black Boy depicts a character that is put into a society of racial inequality. The literary merit behind this book is how an individual survives in a society filled with prejudice and intolerance in the environment. To be completely honest, the narrator is a mischievous child who nobody likes to put up with. He went through a large amount of different jobs, his family members have a hard time dealing with him, and he constantly moves from household to household. Depicting that for him it's pretty hard to survive in any given environment. Living down south was not for him so he decided to find a better lifestyle up north. Finding that racism did not exist as much in the north than it did in the south. I would not say I personally learned a lesson from this novel but the overall lesson was basically survival of the fittest in a prejudice society.