For Cedric Jennings, television symbolizes the middle-class world that he yearns to join. In his childhood, television serves as his escape from the realities of his poverty-stricken home life, and later becomes a source of references and connections that help him to overcome race and class differences with his classmates at Brown. While he and his mother, Barbara, often had to go without food or heat during his childhood, Cedric had a television in his bedroom, giving him a window into worlds that were vastly different from his own, and allowing him to set aside his concerns about grades, test scores, bullying, and money trouble. During his first weeks as a college student, Cedric found that comparing his new classmates to television characters allowed him to connect with them through shared cultural references, giving him a sense of relevance and belonging. Considering that there were many aspects of middle-class life that Cedric did not know or understand, his television references made this new world much less foreign and confusing for him.
Television Symbol Timeline in A Hope in the Unseen
