Rhetoric in "The Souls of Black Folk"

The rhetoric in “The Souls of Black Folk” is quite different from that found in “Up from Slavery”. While “Up from Slavery” is focused on a wide variety of audiences with a broad easy to read writing style, “The Souls of Black Folk” is aimed at a much narrower audience. Dubois uses multiple references to ancient Greek mythology to illustrate3 his points, and although he explains enough so that a layperson unfamiliar with the myths would be able to understand the basic meaning of the metaphor, the text is much more meaningful to someone who already understands them. Besides this Dubois also references quite a few statistics to illustrate the conditions under which black society functions. This is itself an indication of what kind of audience Dubois is writing for. He is writing for an intellectual audience. This also indirectly relates to whether he is writing for a white or black audience. At the time Dubois was writing this the majority of the Black population would not have been able to read this text. Even if they were actually literate they would probably have been to busy working to read a text of this nature, assuming they could even get access to it in the first place. This isn’t to say no blacks at all would read it, but it would be blacks from the more intellectual side of society, likely the ones who were studying or teaching in institutions of higher education. On the other hand while the same reasoning applies to white society, there was a much higher population of white people who fit this description. Of course the entire text is not written in this style. Several of the chapters are written in a narrative style that is both easy to read and describes black life on a more personal level. These chapters would be more accessible to people who would not fall under the category of being intellectual. In fact the nature of the chapter layout itself is quite interesting. The chapters skip between topics that vary widely. While the book on the whole appeals to a more intellectual audience individual chapters vary. This was probably the intent of the relatively random nature of the chapter layout. Dubois was probably attempting to appeal to a very wide audience. So that no matter who read the book at least one or more of the chapters would appeal to them and carry across Dubois’s primary message, which was that the key to the improvement of Black society lay in the education of at least some of the black population in higher more classical forms of education. These people would then be able to more clearly deal with the problems affecting society by dealing with them in ways that would lead to more future improvement rather than simply trying to get short term gains at the expense of long term gains. According to Dubois these long term views and the ability to think and plan for the long term would eventually flow downward through the social classes as long as their was a continuous supply of people being trained at institutions of higher learning.