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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Darkness

Du Bois refers to the perpetual state of the Black people as “the darkness.” Throughout the opening paragraphs in Chapter I, he scatters words that reinforce this image with reference to shadows, night, dark, and dimly lit spaces. In Chapter II, he reiterates that a darkness hangs over his people. His dark imagery gives the book a heavy tone and describes the burdens placed on Black people who are trying to get ahead in life after Emancipation. The author even describes a happy time in his life as taking place in a dark space. Throughout the book, he describes Black people by their dark skin colors. This type of repetition continues in Chapter V, with images of smoke and mist obscuring the way for Black people. Du Bois uses this language to reinforce his reality that the lives of Black people are perpetually obscured by the dark cloud of racism. This darkness, in Du Bois’s mind, is only relieved by the light of education.

Duality 

The recurring idea that Black people must be doubly conscious appears throughout the book. Du Bois derives this concept from the fact that in order to survive, Black people must see themselves as white society sees them in addition to knowing their true selves. White people are not aware of this concept and don’t know what it feels like to have to be aware of oneself in this manner because it is not necessary for them to view themselves through any other lens than their own. Du Bois illustrates his own duality by sharing the facts of his life and his thoughts about how those facts have shaped him. He is a Black Pan-Africanist, but he also considers himself a proud American. Raised in the North but teaching in the South, he knows both the white world and the Black world because of his education. While not all Black people in America have the same level of duality in their own backgrounds, the largely segregated communities in which they work and live contribute to a constant sense of double consciousness.

Trains

Even after Emancipation, very few Black people are able to travel far from their own communities, and those who have the desire to leave and are fortunate enough to afford train travel must journey in a segregated train care regardless of their status. Du Bois travels in the Jim Crow car on the way back to Nashville after a disheartening visit to the small town where he used to teach, a place where none of its inhabitants would have had the need to travel or the means to do so. Even from the confines of a segregated car, Du Bois can see the same America that white passengers witness, and his observations of America’s countryside and cities are as crucial to his understanding of American society as his personal interactions with people. His descriptions of train travel through Georgia invoke images of a sharply divided America, where opportunity falls along color lines as distinctly as it does on segregated cars in the train itself.

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