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Scar

James Alan McPherson is an African-American writer who uses racial issues to bring the reader into the universal notion of identity, self-discovery, and actualization. While there is racial unrest within his material, he sees literature as colorblind, with more general and human issues the primary focus as opposed to a specific racial point-of-view. For instance, in The Story of a Scar, a young woman is stabbed by her college boyfriend while he is in a rage of jealousy. While the characters are young African-Americans, the events depicted and the subsequent issues that surround the event are not engendered to one race or another -- but more of the idea that youth of all races struggle for acceptance and respectability through a variety of uphill battles, cultural and societal bias, and innate prejudice.

It seems that The Story of a Scar is more about how we as humans tend to resist personal growth and fear intimacy on a number of levels. The experience is universal -- it could be a Latino in New Mexico, and Caucasian youth on the South Side of Boston, or an Asian in California.

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While McPherson's narrator is black, the real power of the novel comes through because he needs to continually explain and translate this sad story into his own terms that are somewhat self-loathing and lack depth of feeling for other humans. We see this from the way the prose moves between the people who are in the waiting room -- both need medical attention. When one asks the woman, "As a concerned person…. I ask you, without meaning to offend, how did you get that scar on the side of your face?"

Just as most of us would react, we would be a bit uncomfortable, a bit on edge, and a bit self-deprecating because someone noticed an imperfection:

The woman seemed insulted. Her brown eyes, which before had been wandering vacuously about the room, narrowed suddenly and sparked humbling reprimands at me. She took a draw on her cigarette, puckered her lips, and blew a healthy stream of smoke toward my face. It was a mean….....

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