The Goophered Grapevine

“The Goophered Grapevine” illustrates the impact of African American folk culture and regional realism on American literature after the American Civil War. This influence is reflected in Chesnutt’s narrative structure and characters.

This short story is made up of a framing narrative and a narrative within that story, formally called an “interpolated narrative.” This narrative structure is typical of works that have been influenced by oral culture. In oral cultures, including West African and early African American culture, important cultural values and shared history were transmitted orally, usually in the form of stories. Chesnutt uses various literary devices to honor and revise this oral tradition. He uses dialect to represent Julius’s deep Southern accent. Chesnutt, unable to present a living, breathing Julius to his readers, instead presents, in paragraph 20,a detailed description of what it looks like when Julius tells his story, while the response of his listeners and the lesson they draw from the story are presented in the frame narrative.

The most significant way that Chesnutt revises African American oral tradition is in what he does with the characters typically found in regional literature and dialect stories like the Uncle Remus tales.