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Middle Passage is a novel by Charles Johnson first published in 1990. It is considered Johnson's masterpiece, and he won the National Book Award for it in 1990. Middle Passage is the coming of age story of a recently manumitted character by the name of Rutherford Calhoun. To escape a forced marriage he unwittingly stows away aboard a slave ship leaving New Orleans for the west coast of Africa.

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  • Middle Passage
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  • Middle Passage is a novel by Charles Johnson first published in 1990. It is considered Johnson's masterpiece, and he won the National Book Award for it in 1990. Middle Passage is the coming of age story of a recently manumitted character by the name of Rutherford Calhoun. To escape a forced marriage he unwittingly stows away aboard a slave ship leaving New Orleans for the west coast of Africa.
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abstract
  • Middle Passage is a novel by Charles Johnson first published in 1990. It is considered Johnson's masterpiece, and he won the National Book Award for it in 1990. Middle Passage is the coming of age story of a recently manumitted character by the name of Rutherford Calhoun. To escape a forced marriage he unwittingly stows away aboard a slave ship leaving New Orleans for the west coast of Africa. The novel has a great deal of humor, philisophical speculation, social commentary on race relations, and reflections on what it means to establish a personal identity. The author is an acknowledged devotee of fellow Illinois writer John Gardner, a leading theorist on the post-modern movement in fiction. Johnson's novel is thus unequivocably post-modern. As all works in this traditiion do, it plays around with narrative conventions. Therefore, we see an African tribal god also captured and brought over on the slave ship. This god suffers from contradictions, like being so omnipotent he could create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it. Nevertheless, Johnson avoids the excesses of many post-modern authors and never strays too far from his narrative. The novel stays on the main dilemma posed by the story line: on whose side is an African American employed to serve on a slave ship supposed to be? Jonson's novel is erudite, challenging, engaging, and thoroughly entertaining.
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