Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

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Introduction to the Younger Family Lorraine Hansberry starts off her play A Raisin in the Sun by building up an image of the Younger family’s living quarters. Not fully describing all the characters in the very beginning, she seems to first want to express their current living situation through a vivid description of the area where they spend most of their time, the living room. I feel as though she is telling us characteristics of the Younger family through the descriptions of the house such as the possibility of their financial situation not doing so well, that the cluttered mess that fights to show itself might be a meaning of a fight going on in the family itself, and that as a whole the family is tired of their lives due to the reality of living in that house. It’s obvious from the descriptions of the house that it is much too small for a…show more content…
There is talk of weariness, and how “All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this [living] room” (Hansberry 24). It clearly leaves the effect that the Younger’s in their home don’t live there, they just exist there. That is just the place they go to eat and sleep. Referring back to the fact that the house if just too small for them, “They have clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years - and they are tired”, it plainly states just how exhausted the Younger family must be for living in such containment (Hansberry 23). They are in fact tired and weary. Even the description of Ruth’s appearance of disappointment presents a feeling of spent years living in that house, living in that environment, and how it has taken its toll. The small space seems to be a constant struggle for the Younger’s, and the perfect way to get rid of the weariness that comes along with it is to escape
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