Going To Meet The Man

A flashback is the telling of a story that happened before the story's present narration. In the case of this Baldwin story, the present narration is the night the adult Jesse lays in bed, sleepless, with his wife, Grace. There are two levels of flashback in this story. First, Jesse jumps back to the immediate past, recounting to his wife what happened with the young man at the jail earlier that day. As Jesse tells this story, the protestors' singing causes him to remember the words of another African-American spiritual, thus triggering a flashback to his childhood. The recent flashback explains why Jesse can't sleep and the more distant flashback explains why the present day's events affected him so deeply. The childhood flashback also shows how Jesse's present-day racism and issues with sexuality formed. 

A narrative’s point of view is the way in which the story is narrated and describes who narrates the story. In the case of “Going to Meet the Man,” the point of view is a third-person limited point of view. This means that the narrator refers to its main character,