In Langston Hughes’ short story On The Road, he uses symbolism and imagery to give commentary on the contradictions the church of the 1930’s (and today’s church) have in their theology. Hughes uses On The Road to point out the hypocrisy churches have between what they preach and what they practice. Most Christians believe that Jesus Christ has taught them to love everyone “even the lepers and the tax collectors” and help “the least of these” people. However, many of those same people do not welcome those around them who are different, such as Sargeant, a homeless black man, in the short story not being accepted by the white church. It could be said that Sargeant is looking for more than just warmth, food, and sleep when he knocks on the door of the parsonage and then the doors of the church; he is also looking for religion. This continues when Sargeant is holding onto the pillar of the church, he isn’t just holding on to his change at a warm place to sleep, he is holding on to what is left of his faith. Christian faith would say that the people should let him in and care for him because he is tired and sick and poor. However, instead, they knock him out so he has a hallucination and put him in jail. During his hallucination, Jesus tells Sargeant that the Christians had been left him nailed to a cross for 2000 years, which symbolizes that Christians left him crucified and ignored his teachings even as they claimed to believe in him. On The Road shows that the teachings of the church have lost the meanings Jesus intended.

On the Road, written by Langston Hughes is a story we have all heard too many times. I am not saying it was poorly written or redundant in a boring way, but rather a theme so common to America that it is not shocking to anyone who has taken one American history class. I do think the theme of inequality continues to be extremely hurtful to people today, but people have no choice but to accept that black people were treated horribly by white people. What is different about Hughes, is that he brought religion into his account of the time period. In On the Road, a black man is denied access to uses of the church. What a controversy this stirred. Anyone in a church should know and believe that all men were created equally by God. Unfortunately during these times, white men followed society’s opinion instead of God’s. Hughes added to his point of blacks being treated as shadows to white men, when he made the “white snow” a symbol of hope. Hughes could have been suggesting that the white snow on the ground represented the white population, and the black’s hope rested on their shoulders. This is plausible because for the blacks to ever fully be created equally, it must come from the white peoples opinions and actions.

Through the use of mood, Langston Hughes manages to convey the foreboding feeling of repression in his short story “On the Road”. When describing the frigid weather at the beginning of the story, we are presented with a dreary and cold world where the Sargeant is an obvious outcast in the South during a time when African American people were especially discriminated against. The mood is further dampened when Langston describes the snow as “cold, wet, sticking to his jaws, wet on his black hands, sopping in his shoes.” The repetition of wet in this sentence emphasizes the poor state that the narrator is in, fighting for the smallest things that we would take for granted. Furthermore, this sentence is repeated from the first paragraph, calling attention to the poor state that the narrator is in and making it more personal to the reader so that the reader can feel that they are in his shoes. The mood of the story changes when he sees the chruch because it is described as being white and very symmetrical. The way that the window is described as a “round lacy window with a stone crucifix in the middle” makes the mood lighten as Christianity brightens the path for the narrator, Sargeant.

In the short story “On the Road” the author is making a commentary on the irony of Christianity. It seems as though everyone changes the concepts of the teachings of Christ in order to justify their own biases and how they feel in particular circumstances rather than using the teachings of Christ to help them through each circumstance. In this short story, to prove this irony the white Christians put themselves on a pedestal when seeing a black man trying to enter the church. These whites are supposed to be believers in the words of Christ and believe that all humans are created equal yet when a man of unfamiliarity is attempting to turn to their same religion for help they are hateful towards him. White people feel that they can own the religion.
The author also uses color as a very powerful tool. It is almost as if the white is a known figure and black in an unknown figure. He is merely a shadow (in the eyes of the white people). The black man in misunderstood by his surroundings. The white people on the other hand are raised to a pedestal. Even the white snow is seen to be a symbol of hope and familiarity.

The short story of On the Road by Langston Hughes is a story that shows the reader of the different levels of the ego and consciousness through different archetypes. It is an indirect example of what one person’s psyche could be thinking without the person really knowing it. The main psyche Hughes may be trying to show is the Nation’s. The United States during the depression, when this story takes place, racism was still a very prominent issue. However when this was written, right before the civil rights movements, the national psyche was still very unbalanced in how humans looked at one another. This piece of work spoke through the many archetypes shown. For example, Sargeant, the big black homeless man, represented the “shadow” of the psyche. Because he was black, he represented the dark side of our nation we want to forget and repress. Walking in the snow represented that our nation wanted to cover what they thought was bad and try to change and make a “good” black man always be under the white man. When Sargeant breaks down the door of the church, that represented to me the breaking down the race and color barrier that was holding the Nation back from excelling. That one day the black culture will overcome the racism and will prevail over whites and will become equal. However, the fact that Sargeant dreams up that he talking to a stone Christ that is carried on his should has a religious meaning. It parallels to the story of Christ that he had to carry the cross on his shoulder as well. When Christ thanks Sargeant for freeing him from that church, it shows the reader that whites are being selfish with religion and that it’s possible that Christ wanted to help and relate to the minorities of the Nation that the white culture was not allowing. The religious and racist themes are shown how unfair and unequal it’s had been in the United States and how it needed to change, and eventually it would because the black culture was only getting stronger, spiritually and physically.