James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain

James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain tells the story of John Grimes, a fourteen year-old boy raised in a repressively religious Harlem household who struggles to define his spiritual, sexual, racial, and personal identity. John’s inner tension is heightened, and partially caused, by his convoluted relationship with his father Gabriel, who justifies his controlling and violent nature with his strong Christian faith. In his moment of desperate rapture on the church floor in the novel’s final act, John’s abject hatred of his father is crucial, as his detachment from religion stems from his inability to surrender to Gabriel’s authority as both a holy man and a cruel father. However, when John comes out of the trance and, in doing so, saves himself from his identity crisis, he acquires a means to challenge his father. His acceptance of a faith that forgives sin allows him to combat the faith condemnatory of sin that Gabriel had inflicted upon John for his entire life, …show more content…
His dissociation from his communities cause him to lose himself and even his very humanity, as inextricably bound as it is to the racial, religious, and, most secretly, sexual identity that he cannot accept for himself. Most interesting, though, is that much later John himself, as this internal panic is externalized on the threshing floor, knows “that he had been thrust out of the holy, the joyful, the blood-washed community, that his father had thrust him out” (230), implying that he blames his father, and rightfully so, for his complete detachment from all which would bring him through his