The Beautiful Struggle

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

Exploring The Power of Myth

In this activity, students will create a mythological map to tell the story of their lives, emulating Coates’s own myth-making in The Beautiful Struggle.

One of the core themes in The Beautiful Struggle relates to myth. Elevating the banal realities of everyday life, Coates tells his coming-of-age story using language freighted with meaning—Howard University becomes “Mecca,” Coates’s brother becomes “Big Bill,” and Coates’s education becomes a quest to find “Knowledge.” As with all great myths, the heroes in The Beautiful Struggles are flawed, and their experiences are tumultuous, but by the end of the story they emerge from the tumult, transformed.

Coates includes a map and family tree at the start of the memoir, mirroring the trope in epic fantasy narratives in which a map of the strange and fantastical world the reader is about to encounter is included at the beginning. In this exercise, you will come up with a mythological map to tell the story of your own life:

• First, map out your family tree. On a sheet of poster board, sketch out a tree of everyone in your family, going back as many generations as possible. Feel free to give key family members more “myth appropriate” nicknames, such as Big Bill. 
• Next, sketch your personalized history onto a map. Review the map that Coates includes at the beginning of The Beautiful Struggle, taking note of the types of events and markers he includes. As Coates does, pick a place that has meaning to you, a place that would be an appropriate setting for the story of your life; it could be your town, your home, or some other location.

Share your maps with the class and reflect on the experience of creating this artifact. How did it feel to “mythologize” your life? As you think about your own experience, consider the following: Why was myth-making so important to Coates in his memoir?

Teaching Suggestion: Before embarking on this activity, consider reminding students what they have learned about the bildungsroman genre. Students might then structure their story to model the four phases of a typical bildungsroman: (1) a loss, (2) a journey, (3) conflict and personal growth, and finally (4) maturity. After students have identified their four moments, they can decide what the appropriate geographic location will be.

Differentiation Suggestion: For advanced learners (and especially those students with an interest in fantasy literature), you could take this activity as an opportunity to dive deeper into the trope of fantasy maps—their history, their origins, and how they help add depth and dimension to speculative fiction. This collection of fantasy maps hosted by Pima Community College includes information about popular fantasy maps like L. Frank Baum's Oz and A. A. Milne's "100 Aker Wood" drawn by E. H. Shepherd.