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.