The Impossible Dilemmas

We've only covered 5 books in African-American Literature, but there are certain symmetries and oppositions that have arisen between certain novels. The dissections of Native Son and Invisible Man, where each tries to create a great, thesis-driven African-American novel, have similarities in goal but many differences in their separate approach, namely humor and character agency. The White Boy Shuffle and Invisible Man have an eerily comparative sense of satire despite being over 40 years apart, and both are just as (or even more, depending on your own perspective) funny as Their Eyes Were Watching God, though each brand differs so strongly. There are also repeated scenes and characters of across the books, like power figures Joe Starks and Dr. Bledsoe, the host of "white liberal" presences in each story, and situations such as racist "old Americana" trinkets in IM and Beloved. Like their humor similarities, Ellison and Beatty share a disdain for the education system as it's worked for the black community as is evident in their novels. Plenty of this stuff has been covered in blog posts and research papers, even mine! Though one particular parallel I'd like to explore though is in the first and final books of this course. Both Native Son and Beloved have a "critical scene" that the rest of the novel rotates around; Bigger is caught in an inescapable accidental murder of Mary Dalton, while Sethe is driven by the encroaching forces of slavery to kill her children so they may avoid the atrocities she experienced. Each situation has incredible gravity on the story, but Wright and Morrison both have differingly nuanced approaches in writing and explicating their scenes, that I believe informs the themes and style of their novels. 

Native Son's Bigger Thomas is a predestined figure in Wright's naturalist perspective. Due to the singular control racism has on his life, he is put in certain interactions that he can simply not get the upper hand in. When Jan and Mary try to soften up to him, his unfamiliarity with white friendliness from so many years of oppression combined with their general obliviousness shields him away even further from them. In the pivotal moment of Wright's piece and Bigger's life, when he is forced to carry a passed out Mary to her room and her mother comes in, the sight of white person possibly knowing that a black man was in a white woman's room while she was sleeping drives him to panic. Specifically, his reactionary effort to keep him and Mary silent leaves him with a smothered and completely dead Mary. From then on, Bigger is caught in an inescapable path to his incarceration and eventual execution, all in a situation that, due to his race, he couldn't really do anything to come away scot-free. If he explains himself to Miss Dalton, he creates suspicion and possible outrage for being with a pass-out drunk Mary. If he tries to leave, he might get noticed and will still end up being interrogated for what happened. But both of those hypothetical's don't matter, as by Wright's reasoning, the primal fear that Bigger and African-Americans have of being caught anywhere close to trouble by white people drove him to this inevitable conclusion. By getting a 3rd person perspective that's still informed on the thoughts of Bigger, we get the full picture of his fear in action, and of how predisposed he is to the eventual result. Important to note is the clarity of what's going on in this scene, as Wright's direct protest novel style is built to illustrate his points. The flowchart of action and reaction that occurs is as mechanical and unquestioned as the all-encompassing force of racism is on Bigger's life. 

Sethe's particular moment is just as pivotal as Bigger's, but key alterations to the context, narrative, characters, and novel itself distinguish it from the one seen in Native Son. In short, Sethe's horrid experience in slavery combined with her incredible love for her children leads her to, when confronted with the figures of Sweet Home, kill most of her offspring to put them away from the life she had to go through. Again, like Bigger, due to her race and the trapping conditions set by it (being a runaway slave in pre-Emancipation America) by her own self she is unable to do anything else but slaughter her kin to protect them. This is where those differences we’ve been waiting for come in though. Part of the dilemma that comes in for Sethe is her own emotional attachment, rather than simply racism determining her actions. The context of racism necessitates her to act, but her incredibly strong sense of motherhood forbids her from ever putting her children in the harm of slavery. Sethe’s slaughter is unavoidable for her, but is intentional and out of action rather than out of complete instinct like Bigger. Also, I’d say the complete justification of her actions are still left somewhat ambiguous. Taking the negative reactions to her murders of other Cincinnatians, who were all former slaves and no doubt faced hardships of comparable horror to Sethe, Morrison really wants us to ponder the act for ourselves rather than explicate its unavoidability like in Native Son. For real, the entire third part of Wright’s novel is a breakdown of how this was inevitable, which we just don’t get in Beloved. Instead, we have the short justifications of Sethe, her own emotional profile, and the events and relationships that are affected in her life from doing the unthinkable.

Oh, and one final thing. Both events are absolutely central to their respective books, and set off huge domino effects for the rest of them. But for Bigger, his act seems like just one potential misstep that he happened to fall into, considering how little room he has for error in Wright’s novel. For Sethe’s particular predicament, there is a unique setup required for her to be backed into such a dark corner, though that’s not to say she would never face any difficult situations because of her pre-existing dispositions ever again. It’s more that Bigger’s potential paths all seem to lead to the same result, while Beloved would be entirely different if not for this exact situation of the encroaching four horsemen and Sethe’s indomitable and selfish motherly love.

I might be stating the obvious here a couple times, but it’s a distinction I think is important and interesting to make. And I’m certainly leaving out a few key differences, and would like everyone’s input on how they line up similarly or differ in the comments below!

Some Sweeping Observations of Humor Progression in African-American Lit

I figure I've been doing a lot of fun, in-depth textual analysis on this old blog, so I feel the need to meet my sweeping comparison quota of a huge theme. As you can probably tell by my post, this topic would be the role of humor in the books we've read so far. In fact, I'll be tackling this very same issue in my research paper, so I'd like to outline my conception of comedy in each novel we've been through in this class. In doing this, one sees trends of how each author's use of humor discusses what it means to write an African-American novel.

Native Son is a bold, calculated, dreary, observant, powerful analysis of the predetermined paths white supremacy enforces upon black people in every aspect of life. In its pointed protest however, Wright's progenitor of protest fiction is rendered basically humorless. This exposure of soul-crushing racism, impossible racial dilemmas, and inevitable failure really has no room for it, as Wright's own stance on what a novel written by a black person should be involves pointing straight at the blatant injustice that African-Americans face from white society every single day. As a consequence, the novel is an experimental exercise to highlight the things black people are simply forced out of, and leaves some character nuance beyond simple archetypes and individual thought (especially for Bigger Thomas) in the dust.

As a near direct response to the exceedingly dry, shocking template of protest in Native Son, Invisible Man is concerned with what it means to be black, but also focuses on the diversity of black existence, in that not every black person must be funneled into the white-supremacy meat-grinder of oppression like Bigger Thomas. Ellison bestows his characters with plenty of comedic moments and very different backgrounds to exemplify his goal of diversification, and in doing that says that there is a way to use irony and humor to deflect racist forces and eventually overcome them. Laughter is also a symbol of power in the novel, which is occasionally sinister in the case of the Brotherhood, but goes along with the use of humor as an element of agency. Indeed, the comedic profile of Invisible Man with its bizarre scenarios and Narrator's treatment of them creates a more optimistic outlook than Wright's, without forgetting the overlying plight of invisibility and racism as he experiences it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, unlike the previous two novels, does not outwardly pursue an idea of black existence and elaborate upon it in its pages. Wright had the predestiny that white power structures enforce on the African-American community, Ellison had the undue transference of racial identities on to black people, while Hurston in essence writes an entertaining homage to her background and the characters that inhabited it. The melding of formal English and dialectic turns-of-phrase, along with the vibrant members of the black community she depicts, allude to humor and comedy as a language in itself. One criticism of her novel, besides the absence of racial themes and injustice, is the possible minstrelsy of her more comedy-driven characters, as if they're being held up for a white audience to laugh at the expense of. To me at least, the book is meant to be entertaining, and these black characters that show up in Janie's journey are used to further expose the overlooked sense of humor the black communities have.

In this class, a conversation of humor would not be complete without mention of White Boy Shuffle. As I touched on in my previous post, the book is an extremely intricate satire of modern black life, and though it is absolutely hilarious, it still asks huge questions of the audience, in how funny can this content be with such hopeless depiction of black life. The book is ostensibly about comedy from the African-American perspective, and how exaggerating the landscape has readers walking the line between laughter and sadness of the characters' realities. I'm still bummed out from Beatty's ending to the novel, where after all the comedy of Gunnar's narrative is lost in complete surrender to racism.

So how do y'all like my generalizations? I'm kind of using this post to organize my thoughts before undertaking the comparison of humor in the literary criticism world as well. Hopefully some of my ideas come across in some quick summary like this.

P.S. Seriously though, there's an almost linear progression to how much each book is about comedic material. From 0 to like 99% in just 4 books.

The White Boy Shuffle's Seriously Good Satire

I am really loving this book. Still early obviously, but the writing is always razor sharp, the characters are all getting their spotlights, and the story is moving along in a properly bizarre fashion. Well I say properly because of the intensely satirical nature of The White Boy Shuffle. Good satire always exaggerates the characters, situations, and environments to make readers/viewers laugh as much as they think. However, where other forms of satire occasionally drop the social critique for some pure gags or silly tangents, as far as I've seen Beatty's has remained dedicated, and hyper-aware on all levels of his novel.

Let's start with everybody's favorite "funny, cool black guy" Gunnar Kaufman (28). Our narrator is a precocious pre-teen with a lineage he despises for the conflicting racial baggage they've bestowed on him. His "weak-kneed DNA" is, as he puts it, loaded with "Uncle Toms" and "faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers", which give him shame as he comes to term with his own racial identity. Gunnar's voice is sort of like a far more mature South Park character, constantly poking fun at everything around him while showing readers his biting criticism towards society's racism in particular areas of life. Some ridiculous circumstances Beatty bestows include Gunnar's aforementioned ridiculously racially submissive family tree (with hilariously pointed European names such as Euripides and Wolfgang), and Gunnar's status as a "white-friendly" black kid who has characteristically "non-black" interests. Beatty plays with this archetype, having Gunnar be a surfer, fried-chicken hater, and WWII enthusiast, while simultaneously self-aware of his breaking of African-American stereotypes. Obviously, Beatty isn't saying that any black person with these interests or qualities are inherently an abhorrence to the race, he's just pointing out how ironic they are and insecure they make Gunnar in relation to his ancestors. However, this is one of the many cases where we laugh wondering if we should or not, considering how touchy the notion of someone being "not black enough" can be, which is deliberate on Beatty's part. And it makes for good satire!

Plus, the racial situations that Gunnar and others are put through are likewise purposefully exaggerated or straight up insane, often to create that uncomfortably-close-revealing-hilarious satire so critical to Beatty's story. The first impression we even get of the narrator has him leading a massive group suicide in the name of racial justice as "the ultimate sit-in". Sure, it's ridiculous, but isn't the fact that racism just never dies equally so? And isn't this last resort symbolic of how hard African-Americans have tried for social equality for years, and yet "nothing works"? (2) Then there's Gunnar's hypocritical "multicultural school", which in its efforts for diversity only succeeds in singling out minority students and giving misconceptions about race. My early education consisted of two types of multiculturalism: classroom multiculturalism, which reduced race, sexual orientation, and gender to inconsequence, and schoolyard multiculturalism, where the kids who knew the most Polack, queer, and farmer's daughter jokes ruled." (28). Those who went through the forced multiculturalism in school harken back to those days when Ms. Cegeny mentions being "colorblind" and seemingly deliberately brushes off all notions of race for students. Again, an enhanced critique of racist ignorance through exaggerated satire. One of the most memorable is Chapter 3's cop interaction, where the LAPD "dressed to oppress" show up to Gunnar's home and give him the most assumptive and racist interview one could expect (47). It's so over-the-top, with Gunnar and the cops speaking in a sort of mutual understanding of how ridiculous the cops' racism is. They admit to beating the shit out of innocent people to prevent crime, assume Gunnar is part of gang, and mention in passing that they'll be seeing the young Kaufman in jail someday all in the span of a page. This staggeringly honest portrayal of the clearly racist police in the Los Angeles area satirizes how obvious their racial bias is in real life. All the while, Brenda Kaufman lets her son handle it himself as if an interview with the LAPD is a rite of passage for a black kid coming of age.

Ultimately, I think Beatty's brand of satire is gonna get harder to laugh at as we go on, considering how close to full out social criticism he seems to be getting already. In Gunnar's stint in the ghetto there have already been some caricatured black characters that are possibly in the vein of minstrelsy we have discussed in class. I'm interested to hear your own thoughts on the socially-minded humor in the book and how it might progress.

 

Goldilocks and the Three Husbands (and Manic Pixie Dream Tea Cake)

This is a well-worn trope of anything having to do with three different statuses with the final being "just right", so I present to you the newest tale on the block: Janie and the Three Hubbies! It's a pretty liberal simplification, but that's the impression I got once Janie fell out with two consecutive husbands and finds a new boyf in the immensely charming Tea Cake. In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the titular character tries out three different porridge bowls, chairs, and beds, with one of them in each case satiating Goldilocks' fancies. Janie admittedly takes a bit more time in feeling out the first two husbands, and in the case of Joe Starks is intrigued by him for a little while before flaking, but the folklore dynamic still remains. As such, each of the husbands occupies a different state of control over Janie, with Tea Cake representing the "just right" alternative.

Her first marriage with Logan Killicks is comparatively short-lived as well as totally garbage. Indeed, her time as Ms. Killicks fulfills all her fears about marriage that were overseen by Nanny. In the middle of it she learns that "marriage did not make love", and that her "first dream was dead". Reminder: this girl is still a teenager! This thing sucks so much that she's already had her dreams die, come to conclusions about the nature of marriage, and been forced into premature womanhood! But that's kind of aside the point. Logan's own relationship with Janie is basically busywork and verbal abuse. Like when he makes her pile manure and chop wood against her will and yet still calls her "spoiled rotten"; not quite the vision of married life she ever wanted for herself (26). Sure, his requests would be justified if she had chosen the farmer's life for herself (though the mocking wouldn't) but she clearly never wanted to, making Logan perhaps the "too cold" porridge: intimately distant and expectant of too much. 

Janie quickly moves on to the next bowl/chair/bed when she meets the driven Joe Starks, a passing-through respectable man with dreams of the future and ambition to spare. Especially when Joe flings promises to have her made a wife but "treated lak a lady", one can see how this new status is extremely appealing to an overworked, underage farmer's wife (29). However, what Joe sees in her is almost the polar opposite of the Killicks' treatment; instead of the hardworking expectations of farm life, she is made a trophy wife by Starks, with little mobility of what she wants to do. Unfortunately, she's stuck with the sexist control for 17 years, and this predictably damages her independent spirit quite heavily. "The years took all the fight out of Janie's face (...) Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels" is how she's described after so long being held on a pedestal she didn't want to be on (76). She does eventually work up the strength to just roast the hell out of Jody's saggy britches in the middle of the supermarket ("when you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life") and pops his vanity into bleeding "like a flood" in front of everyone (79). Which I guess is the way for Janie to move on from each not-right husband; she didn't pull any punches on Logan's skeleton-head-looking self. But Starks responds to this pent-up protest by striking his wife in utter embarrassment and hatred, capping off yet another crappy coupling in painfully extended duration. There are certainly some partners in the world that would cherish and play the trophy-wife with enthusiasm, just as there are some willing farmer women for Killicks, but Janie fits neither of those roles and strikingly so.

Joe gets sick (presumably from being fatally roasted by his estranged and angry wife) and eventually dies after a very sad conversation about how wrong the wedded pair were for each other. At this point, readers are extremely skeptical about another man ever entering Janie’s world or suggesting married life, as her own experience in marriage has been completely draining and horrible. And yet, as the tale would comply, third time seems to be the charm. Enter from stage right Virgible Woods aka Tea Cake, the liberated, sweet-talking, and infinitely affable young gun who treats Janie, for once, as an equal. They meet over a game of checkers, which on so many levels charms Janie past her previous affairs. Where Logan would’ve made her do more work and Jody would’ve prohibited, Tea Cake teaches her the fun game and even compliments her on it, reckoning she’ll “be uh good player too, after a while” (96). This is just the beginning of Tea Cake’s lovable antics; a hair combing and invisible guitar picking later Janie seems to be completely at home with him, and convinced that the character is as sweet as his name might suggest. This seemingly perfect fit allows her plenty of social and personal freedoms that she hadn’t seen before.

Which begs the question: is Tea Cake kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Boy? Specifically, a massively desirable, completely available, static character shallow in its quirkiness and only geared towards making the protagonist happy? Such a criticism in the small glimpse we’ve seen of Tea Cake I think is sort of fair; there are no perceivable flaws with him and he is extremely interested in Janie for vague reason. Of course, we have still seen very little of this character and thus his motivations are difficult to analyze. It’s also important to see how much better he is from the previous husbands and how that might gloss over his flaws a bit. However, MPD people are often either the deus ex machina of the protagonist’s personal resolution, or the subject of (weak) tragedy in losing an inexplicably perfect human being who is solely interested in the protagonist. Both are bad storytelling. But that’s all a bit more involved than some nicely temperature porridge.

So please, let me know if you agree/disagree with the Goldilocks similarity or allusion to manic-pixie-dream-ism in Tea Cake. If it's the latter, just don't roast me like Janie roasts bad husbands. Though it would be funny.

"White Liberalism" in Invisible Man

Though our discussion of the "white liberal" phenomenon has mostly occurred during the Native Son section of this class, I feel that Invisible Man offers an even more thought-provoking and nuanced spin on the archetype. Mary and Jan might have SOME good intentions, but are crippled by their ignorance of racial barriers with the oppressed, fearful Bigger Thomas, and their general self-indulgent attitudes for acting all buddy-buddy with a black person. In Invisible Man, the narrator mostly explores the dynamic while working with white people, whether it be chauffeuring Mr, Norton, his discussion with Mr. Emerson, or the passive-aggressive revisionist racism of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood especially goes to show what happens when the tenets of white liberalism are formed into a constructed ideology, which has a sound concluding vision but very poor methods of interracial interaction that result in racist erasure.

Norton's ignorance is from the upper-class educator perspective; he is shielded from the realities of the black world around his campus and is utterly shocked to find the surrounding areas of his campus different from what he promotes inside. Like the others, he thinks himself a friend of the "black people", yet comes across with more of a savior complex than a true ally towards the civil rights of another race. "I felt even as a young man that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny" he explains to the narrator, on the topic of his educational interest (41). Lines like "Yes, you are my fate, young man" are utterly patronizing and pressuring for the timid narrator, who simply wants to get this interaction over with before anything goes wrong (which is unsuccessful of course) (42). If Norton were a true believer in racial justice that had a good picture of what the African-American community needed, he would not refer to an uneducated black man as a "defective cog" (45), nor would he react so strongly and inappropriately to Trueblood's story. Norton is initially disgusted and appalled, not believing that a member of the race he tries to help could do something so "monstrous" (49). After he speaks with Trueblood and hears in grave detail what exactly went down, his action of giving him a hundred-dollar bill seems much less a gesture of help rather than an exchange for a tabloid commodity: compensation for a good shock. Perhaps his intentions are somewhat justified—after all, what would one do in that situation—yet his incredulity that something like this can happen shows just how unseeing Norton is of the big picture compared to his elevated self-worth for his “activism” in the black community.  

Emerson’s white liberalism is a bit less obvious and harmful to the narrator than the other two, but nonetheless definitely exists. Though at first Emerson seems to be speaking conversationally with the narrator, he feels the need to name drop the “Club Calamus”, a trendy Harlem rendezvous that Emerson clearly prides himself in going to, especially in front of a black guy. Like Stefon from SNL with self-congratulating racist undertones (“Harlem’s hottest club is…”). Later on, he also mentions his “friends are jazz musicians” and that he “knows the conditions” under which the narrator lives, which harken some serious Jan and Mary flashbacks about knowing the plight of the black man and what not (188). The true kicker of the conversation is when Emerson asks the narrator to “speak with utter frankness” towards him, in a fairly unnecessary and discomfiting tangent:

What I mean is, do you believe it possible for us, the two of us, to throw off the mask of custom and manners that insulate man from man, and converse in naked honesty and frankness?

Though Emerson wants to speak with the narrator on normal terms, the way to do so is not to make so painfully obvious your racial differences, but to keep speaking like a normal person. I found this to be one of the most cringe-worthy scenes in the whole book, because the narrator clearly wants to figure out this important message and move on, but Emerson hinders him with babble about being equals and forgetting race when it doesn’t need to be an issue at all! The message eventually gets through to the narrator, but not without some frustration with Emerson’s white liberal self-indulgence and pandering.

And of course, one cannot talk about uncomfortable race relations without referring to the Brotherhood at some point. The narrator’s time with the Brotherhood is so expansive that it’s hard to even pick which incidents to talk about. Their motives are initially hazy when the narrator is grabbed after his eviction speech for the seeming wrong reasons. The first scene in Brother Jack’s lair is loaded with aggressive white liberalism, such as the strong reaction to the narrator being asked to sing a spiritual. Without him getting a word in edgewise, Brother Jack goes nuclear on the drunkard for even suggesting that the narrator would sing a spiritual, and removes him from the premises. This ridiculous reaction to a fairly innocuous bit of racism and generalization shows Jack’s motives are not listening to the black community and incorporating them into his Brotherhood vision, but instead making blatantly obvious what he thinks is best for the race. Jack relentlessly tries to make members of the Brotherhood forget their differences, and having a black man sing a spiritual is out of that vision. The lady that approaches him afterwards relishes in resisting the temptation to hear him sing. “I would never ask one of our colored brothers to sing, even though I love to hear them. That would be a very backward thing.” (314). The narrator is completely puzzled by this, because after all, what is exactly wrong with asking a black person to sing? Sure, the guy that asked him was obviously out of line and thought of black people as jukeboxes, but her and Jack’s reactions are so uncalled for and demonstrate just how blind the white liberal ideology can be. The problem is the guy, not the fact that the narrator was asked to sing! However, the most harmful instances of the Brotherhood in this sense are with Brother Tarp’s leg chain and the death of Tod Clifton. Brother Wrestrum completely meddles with the narrator’s standing in the Brotherhood for receiving Brother Tarp’s leg chain. “I don’t think we ought to dramatize our differences” Wrestrum reasons for his outrage (392). Though it is clear that the narrator wants to keep it as a symbol for himself and the oppression he’s fighting against, Wrestrum exposes the true colors of the Brotherhood: racist revisionism and hiding the truth of history instead of utilizing it for social change. Wrestrum’s testament to the Brotherhood totally jeopardizes the narrator’s position, over such a completely petty circumstance. Finally, their treatment of Clifton’s death is nothing short of sickening. They call their youth organizer a “traitorous merchant of vile instruments of anti-Negro, anti-minority racist bigotry” for selling these stupid Sambo dolls for some cash, when he was gunned down by the police for not having a license (466)! Their real concern is dissociating themselves from anything that could hurt their organization, rather than tackling issues that matter (such as murder by racist police). This is white liberalism taken to its most harmful extent, trying to erase the race card from all given situations and project a different false reality, no matter how contradictory it may be to their original message.

The narrator ends up realizing this on his own later in the novel, and sums up this racist treatment he’s been facing from these white figures:

And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used. I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except now I recognize my invisibility. (508)

The Vicious Cycle of Black Education as Portrayed by Invisible Man

The narrator of Invisible Man—at least initially—is a budding member of the educated black class, or “conscientious elite” on the black respectability wheel (shout-out to Mr. Sutton). In the context of 1920’s America, that seemed a great place to be for any black man who grew up poor. But as he does repeatedly throughout the novel, Ellison pulls the rug out from under readers to expose just how cutthroat and fragile the obtainment and maintenance of power for black people really is, especially in the education system. The main insights of this dynamic we get in Invisible Man are that of the budding scholar (the Narrator), and the longtime power-holder (Bledsoe). Through these two figures, we come to understand the self-destructive cycle of black education; with the little success that the African-American community gets comes a pressing need to maintain that prestige, which turns successful black people against the lower, poorer classes for “dragging them down”, and creates a mutual dislike from the lower classes and an even lower reputation for the race as a whole, ending in even fewer black successes.

The first picture—in the Narrator’s own depiction at least—we get of our protagonist is one that “schools” his way to privilege coming out of high school. He will deliver a speech and be presented with a scholarship to a University by the school officials, but only once he finishes a disgusting Battle Royal, and with a bloody mouth at that. Though it is clear that the white educators think very little of him, he still goes along with all of their scheme, and still believes that they are doing what’s best for him. Because in the case of the Narrator, the way he succeeded was by believing in the oppressive system that allowed him extensive education. But as he soon learns from Bledsoe, (and his grandpa!) the way to maintain this power is to play along with the system, but never to believe in it, and vanquish anything that could possibly harm it. After the Narrator comes back from his escapade with Mr Norton, Bledsoe is absolutely furious to both his unawareness of gaming the system and the threat he poses to Bledsoe and the whole college. “You’re black and living in the south, did you forget to lie!” Bledsoe exclaims, “the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!” (139). Bledsoe is intimately familiar with how fragile his power really is, and the Narrator’s incompetency with the system is promptly rewarded with expulsion from the college. The Narrator’s college experience and encounter with Bledsoe inform the beginning of this cycle.

Ellison also shows the class conflict within African-American elite and working/poor class. For one, the Narrator holds serious contempt for lower class black people, such as Trueblood, the Vet, and even his own grandparents at one point. After him and Norton exit from the Golden Day, he becomes intensely apologetic for everything they had seen:

I wanted to stop the car and talk with Mr. Norton, to beg his pardon for what he had seen; to plead and show him tears, unashamed tears like those of a child before his parent; to denounce all we’d seen and heard; to assure him that far from being like any of the people we had seen, I hated them, that I believed in the principles of the Founder with all my heart and soul (…) (99)

Clearly, the Narrator in this instance is completely caught in the cycle; his need to maintain success makes him want to grovel in front of this white donor, and show just how much he hates unhinged black people unlike himself. Bledsoe holds this cutthroat mentality as well, to an even farther extreme:

“I’ve made my place (...) and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs if it means staying where I am” (143).

This is just a small glimpse into the cycle Invisible Man eludes to. Thanks to the whitewashing system of education, one can see how much cyclical harm can be inflicted on the black community, literally turning them against each other and preventing further access to power. What Ellison demonstrates is not a race combining to “wear the mask” of invisibility for the greater good, but only individuals coming to wear it in power in increasingly fewer numbers. 

The Natural Symbols of Native Son

Let me preface with this; I'm a sucker for symbolism. I feel I've done a touch too many assignments on the topic during my academic career, but with so many books just brimming with it, how can one resist!

Native Son is, in my view, a very dichotomous book with various binary forces converging all at once. White and black, rich and poor, man and woman, communism and capitalism, life and death, fear and control, the list goes on. For a book driven by simplified, powerful forces such as these, symbolism becomes all the more effective in conveying its themes. Often times in this particular novel, one will find these allusions in the environment Wright creates for Bigger, going along with the naturalism we've discussed of him. So let's take a look!

One of Wright's favorite symbols in Native Son is the simplest of them all; color. Repeatedly, Wright barrages readers with decidedly black and white imagery, objects, and scenes to represent the racial root of Bigger's problems and anxieties. Especially in book two, where his fear reaches several climaxes, Wright unnecessarily (?) adds increasing figures that are either black or white. Take the first couple pages of Flight. He sees Mary's "black purse", looks at his blade with its "dried ridges of black blood", grips a pamphlet in his "black fingers" which at the bottom has a "black and white picture of a hammer and curving knife" as well as a "white hand clasping a black hand" (98). All of that is on the SAME PAGE, the second page of book two! Maybe I'm as paranoid as Bigger, but I don't think I'd always describe a purse, blood, my fingers, and a picture with their respective color in such quick succession of one another. The list goes on; the Dalton's snowy Chicago estate looms "white and silent" (116). As he puts Mary's corpse into the furnace, he sees a "white cat" staring back at him (91).He sees Mrs Dalton the day after the murder "dressed in white, her pale face as it had been when she was standing in the darkness", with "eyes almost as white as her face and her hair and her dress" (127, 128). It goes along with his perception of white people as a "force", creeping closer to Bigger's inevitable demise (114). Perhaps Bigger puts it best for showing how this form of  symbolism gets to the origin of his dilemmas:

"(...) she would not want to hear him tell of how drunk her daughter had been. After all, he was black and she was white. He was poor and she was rich." (128).

In tandem with these tinted reminders of Bigger's racial struggle and conflict, several scenes in the novel either predestine the protagonist or take on new symbolic meaning. The first scene of Native Son  starts us off with some solid foreshadowing. In a stressful opening, Bigger Thomas and Family wake up to a nasty rat invading their dingy household. In sum, Bigger chases around the rat with a skillet until the rat, with all escape holes covered up by Bigger,  bares "long yellow fangs" out of fear, with his "belly quivering", until Bigger smashes it with a shoe. This quite obviously mirrors the ending episode of Book Two, with Bigger as the rat, and the massive encroaching white police force, or even just white society in general as Bigger. Both are backed into inescapable corners, and out of crushing fear and desperation, react with violence. Even the disgusted monikers the Thomas family give the rat ("Gee, he's a big bastard", "sonofabitch could cut your throat") later remind us of the brutish negative remarks given by the white members of Bigger's trial towards him in Book Three.

My other favorite example would have to be the case of the furnace. It's very brief, but in Bigger's interactions with the furnace, it seems to have a curse-like effect on him, possibly as a consequence of his guilt. For one, after he puts Mary there, almost every time he comes down to the furnace with others, he always thinks about killing them. He hatches the idea of murdering the white cat that sees him pouring Dalton's body into the furnace before he remembers that "cats can't talk" (91). He even thinks about murdering Peggy when she comes down with him the next morning, though she never even looks into the furnace. When Mr. Dalton comes down into the basement and finds out that Mary did not in fact go to school yesterday, the awkward silence between them is filled with mention that "the furnace droned" in the background, and again when he explains Jan exploits to Britten, and as both are immediately after Bigger lies to someone, it seems that the ghost of Mary Dalton is beckoning for attention at the site of her cremation (165, 166). Finally, a bit after he delivers the ransom note, he approaches the furnace and his body is overtaken with dread:

"A strange sensation enveloped him. Something tingled in his stomach and on his scalp. His knees wobbled, giving way. He stumbled to the wall and leaned against it weakly. A wave of numbness spread fanwise from his stomach over his entire body, including his head and eyes, making his mouth gap. Strength ebbed from him. He sank to his knees and pressed his fingers to the floor to keep from tumbling over. And organic sense of dread seized him. His teeth chattered and he felt sweat sliding down his armpits and back. He groaned, holding as still as possible, His vision was blurred; but gradually it cleared. Again he saw the furnace. Then he realized he had been on the verge of collapse. Soon the glare and drone of the fire came to his eyes and ears." (185)

So yeah. I think I'll just let that paragraph speak for itself. The description evokes a dominating force guilt and anguish, coming back to bite him for his horrible crime, just when he thought he could game the system. This particular passage really won me over to the powers of symbolism in this book. But hey, call me on my comprehensive B.S if you think I'm a whackjob for all this. Or agree with me, that's always fine too.