The ways in which the names of the following characters illuminate their roles in the text: John, Roy, Gabriel, Elizabeth, and Elisha in the novel "Go Tell It On The Mountain" by Ernest Gaines.

In "Go Tell It on the Mountain", author James Baldwin describes the course of the fourteenth birthday of John Grimes in Harlem, 1935. Baldwin also uses extended flashback episodes to recount the lives of John's parents and aunt and to link this urban boy in the North to his slave grandmother in an earlier South. The first section follows John's thoughts, the second mostly his aunt's, the third his father's, the fourth his mother's, and the …

…his involvement with the girl. These names have such profound meanings behind them but Gaines does a magnificent job at deconstructing these names. Each character had some kind of resemblance to the characters in the bible but all had flaws that separated them from the divinity that their names projected. Even with these flaws Gaines still allowed some to reach a point where their life was almost as close to the characters in the Bible.