Friday, November 15, 2019

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison


Invisible Man
By Ralph Ellison
Image Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica

1.      Bibliography

Ellison, R. (1952). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International. ISBN 0808554123

2.      Plot Summary

“The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young black man who moves in the 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters "see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination," he is effectively invisible. He leaves the racist South for New York City, but his encounters continue to disgust him. Ultimately, he retreats to a hole in the ground, which he furnishes and makes his home. There, brilliantly illuminated by stolen electricity, he can seek his identity.”
An unnamed black narrator strives to understand both himself and what it means to be black in America. In the prologue, we are introduced to the narrator who lives rent-free in an abandoned basement of a New York City apartment.  It is the present and the following chapters are told retrospectively about how he became “invisible”. He tells how he grew up in a Southern town where blacks cater to whites.  He tells about his grandfather, a slave, who said on this deathbed to “overcome with yeses”. He is invited to speak at a hotel and is awarded a scholarship to a black college. At the college, he is given the responsibility to drive one of the trustees but things go horribly wrong and he is kicked out of college.  The college president gives him letters of introduction to trustees in New York City.  He is turned away from these men and ends up working at a paint factory. An explosion at the factory puts him out on the street where he is taken in by a kind lady in Harlem.  Coming across an eviction in process, he comes to the aid of the evicted couple giving a speech the stirs the crowd into action.  This speech is overheard by “The Brotherhood” who asks him to work for them using a scientific method to bring about action in the community. The narrator and The Brotherhood clash in ideology.  Things go wrong culminating in a riot that brings our protagonist to find his hidden home and discover his invisibility.

3.      Critical Analysis

Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s first novel.  It is a story of self-discovery and is widely recognized as one of the great novels examining the African-American experience. The invisibility of Ellison’s title character is about the invisibility of identity (above all, what it means to be a black man) and its various pretenses, confronting both personal experience and the power of collective misconceptions. The novel’s special quality is its skillful combination of inquiry into identity and what it means to be socially or racially invisible. It is a metaphor for the history of the African-American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, looking back at his moves through the dreamlike reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less unwelcoming world of New York City.
Key characters include the Invisible Man who acts as the narrator.  He is a young naïve black man and everything is seen through his eyes.  Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, pretends to be humble and subservient to whites, yet is intent on having power.  Mr. Norton, a college trustee, and northern white businessman is obsessed with love for his daughter and brags about his generous monetary gifts to blacks. Lucius Brockway, an old black man who works in the basement of the paint factory. Mary Rambo, a kind black lady who dedicates herself to others.  Brother Jack a white leader of the Brotherhood.  Outwardly calm and nonracist but in reality, he uses people and betrays them.  Tod Clifton, and intelligent, sensitive, handsome and idealistic black youth.  He is a man of action, popular in the Brotherhood but he cannot tolerate the reality that he is no more than a puppet to the organization. Brother Tarp, and older black man and fatherly toward the narrator.  Ras the Exhorter, a black militant who believes in the total separation of the races.
The themes of the novel include invisibility.  The narrator discovers that people neither see nor understand him.  No one sees the individual underneath all his labels and he does not see his full potential.  Quest for identity is explored.  As a young man, the narrator tries to be what he thinks others want him to be. He discovers, after much struggle, that freedom lies in finding out who he really is as a human being and as a black man. Another theme is the stereotyping of African-Americans. The protagonist responds to whites’ prejudices by using lots of deodorants, always being punctual, and eating traditional American food. The novel also explores the rejection of Marxism.  The primary character rejects the Brotherhood’s Marxist view of history as a rational, scientific process moving in a straight line toward the ultimate goal of a classless society.  And, most certainly, the novel explores black pride. The narrator knows that his position of “invisibility” is absurd.  He is human but is seen as less than human. Ellison claims that blacks have sometimes responded to whites’ racism by showing a passive, yet constant hatred (like the narrator’s grandfather), by adopting amoral behavior (like Rinehart), or by deceiving and using whites (Bledsoe). Ellison’s alternative is to assert black cultural pride.
The main symbols used in the story include the blindfold which represents those barriers that prevent people from seeing themselves and others.  Another symbol is the battle royal which symbolizes the struggle of blacks in a society controlled by whites.  The sambo dolls represent those blacks who are easily manipulated by whites.  The possessions of the evicted couple represent the black American past and animals stand for primitive human instincts that lie beneath the civilized surface. The briefcase stands for the narrator’s past life.  It contains papers from his past and he has to destroy it to illuminate his present and move into the future. The author uses rich, powerful, superbly controlled language. A first-person narrator gives an overall impression of events rather than a detailed, analytical view.  A tone of detachment keeps the narrative from sounding bitter.
While Invisible Man bears comparison with other existential novels, it also maps out the story of one man’s identity against the struggles of shared self-definition. The novel takes the central character through the limited possibilities offered to African-Americans, from enslaved grandparents through southern education, through to all the Harlem politics. Ellison’s precision in the way he shows his narrator-protagonist working through these possibilities is skillfully worked into a novel about particular people, events, and situations, from the terrifying world of the mockingly named Liberty Paints to the socialist scheming of the Brotherhood. In the process, Ellison offers sensitive but harsh critiques of the resources of the black culture, such as religion and music.

4.      Expert Reviews

-         -  National Book Award for Fiction
-        -   Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Special Achievement
-        -   Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
-         -  Kirkus Review: “An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem. This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style.
-          - New York Times: "Invisible Man" is tough, brutal and sensational. It is uneven in quality. But it blazes with authentic talent. No one interested in books by or about American Negroes should miss it.”
-         -  Newyorker: “This complicated kind of progress seemed to me to accurately reflect how, for the marginalized in America, choices have never been clear or easy.”

5.      Connections

Other books by Ralph Ellison:
-          (1986). Going to the Territory. Random House. ISBN 0679760016
-          (1996). Flying Home. Random House. ISBN 0679457046
-          (2000). Trading Twelves. Modern Library. ISBN 0375503676
-          (2010). Three Days Before the Shooting. Modern Library. ISBN 9780375759536

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison


The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
Image Credit: Penguin Random House


1.      Bibliography

Morrison, T. (2007). The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0307278441

2.      Plot Summary

A grown woman, Claudia, tells us about an incident that happened years ago in Lorain, Ohio. The memory of this event continues to trouble her today because there are no answers as to why it happened. The knowledge that a friend of Claudia and her sister was pregnant with the child of her own father, suddenly ripped away all of their childhood innocence. They knew that men often get violent when they are drunk and that sometimes men, in blind despondency, commit mean and hateful acts – including rape. But neither Claudia nor her sister had ever seen anyone whose father had raped his own daughter.
They wished long and hard that the baby would be well and strong. In an attempt to help make this happen, they secretly planted some marigold seeds thinking that if the marigolds grew and bloomed, then maybe there would be hope for their friend’s baby. But they didn’t. Claudia has decided that the earth was suppressing the repulsive act of rape, letting people know a terrible atrocity had occurred and that people should realize that the absence of marigolds would be remembered as a symbol of this crime against nature.

3.      Critical Analysis

The Bluest Eye is an introspective novel of black consciousness, written in 1970 by Toni Morrison. The author grew up in Lorain, Ohio, not far from Cleveland.  She was deeply influenced by the authors William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Hamilton. She began writing books that she wanted to read; books that no one had written yet, while she worked as an editor at Random House. Her novel Song of Solomon received the Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; Beloved received the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Bluest Eye takes place mostly in Lorain, Ohio although, the back-story of the primary character’s parents takes place in Georgia and Kentucky.  The primary story takes place from 1940 to 1941. The key characters include Pecola Breedlove; an exceedingly plain young black girl who is placed in the MacTeer home after her father accidentally and drunkenly burns the family house to the ground. Pauline Breedlove; Pecola’s mother who was left with a permanent limp after stepping on a nail when she was a child. Cholly Breedlove; Pecola’s father who was discarded and left to die on a pile of junk when he was only a few days old. Sammy Breedlove; Pecola’s brother who lives in perpetual dread of this father’s violence. Geraldine; a black woman striving for middle-class status. Louis, Jr; Geraldine’s son. Soaphead Church; a mixed-blood, eccentric, self-claimed faith healer whom Pecola seeks out, asking him to give her the miracle of blue eyes. And, Claudia MacTeer; the frame narrator of the novel.
The main themes of the novel include the need for a home, acceptance, and fantasy.  Pecola and both of her parents have felt abandoned and alone through most of the story; they long for a loving home.  The theme of acceptance also is a major thread of the story. Pecola does not feel love or belonging (acceptance) anywhere.  Her father ignores her, her mother pours more comfort into the daughter of the family for whom she keeps the house.  And, because she feels ugly due to the extreme blackness of her skin, she feels that even her friends don’t want her. The theme of fantasy runs through the novel.  Several characters live in the fantasy of a better life.  Pecola’s fantasy of having blue eyes is central to the story.  Her mother “plays house” by trying to make her siblings have a better life.  The MacTeer’s border, Mr. Henry watches his fantasy life in a motion picture.  Pecola’s father’s fantasies are triggered by alcohol when he imagines that Pecola is a younger version of his wife.  Soaphead Church imagines he’s of noble ancestry. Maureen Peel, the most popular girl in school, is the sexual fantasy of all the schoolboys.
            The main symbols of the novel include blue eyes, marigolds, Dick and Jane, a Shirley Temple Drinking Cup, and “two lynch ropes”.  To Pecola, blue eyes are a symbol of the seemingly perfect world of white people. She latches onto this idea from reading the primer picture books with the blue-eyed children, their loving family, fun pets, and near-perfect life. Pecola believes that if she had blue eyes, she would be pretty and others would love an accept her.  Geraldine had a prized black cat with blue eyes.  And, owning that cat made her feel special, classier and unique.  She blames Pecola for killing her cat and makes Pecola feel more unworthy of approval.  Marigolds are a hardy fall flower. Claudia feels that, since they generally grow easily, it is a sign when they can’t get the flowers to grow in the barren earth. This lack of fertility, she feels, is nature crying out against the violation of what parents can do to their children. Dick and Jane, the -white family in the books that were used to teach children to read, was worshiped by Pecola.  She feels that this is the family and life you get to lead if you have blue eyes. The Shirley Temple cup is the cup that Pecola gets to use at the MacTeer house.  Pecola drinks a lot of milk just so she can gaze at the blond-haired, blue-eyed image on the cup. Toni Morrison describes the character of Maureen as having her hair braided into ‘two lynched ropes’. The schoolchildren adore her for her ‘white looks’ and have been taught by their parents and Hollywood to value images with white-woman-coifed-hairdos. The MacTeer girls have better self-esteem and don’t see Maureen as their other classmates do.
            The novel is written from the vantage point of a frame narrator with Claudia MacTeer recounting the story after she is grown. Each section starts with sentences from the Dick and Jane primers.  She runs them all together in a dizzying effect. The sentences are repeated over and over as if Pecola is trying to memorize them and learn the secret of how to live in that fantasy world.  The sentences come a spiral and blue as Pecola herself spin into madness. The story is told through four seasons.  This structure is used to show the passage of time.  The seasons are used as section headers but don’t seem to be used to mean anything within the story.  The backstories of Pecola’s mother and father interrupt the flow of time as does the story of Geraldine’s cat. The seasons, as a passage of time, indicate how much a young girl’s life can change in such a short amount of time.
            The Bluest Eye was Toni Morrison’s first novel.  It started as a short story that Morrison read to members of a literary club at Howard.  Unlike most stories of the time, it was not about a brave black girl battling prejudice but about a victim and bias for light skin.  Morrison writes about racial harassment by her black schoolmates, family, and neighbors.  And, Pecola, who never protests or retaliates but is a victim and lets things happen all while hoping and believing that blue eyes would deliver her from her terror and squalor.  It is also a novel of survival.  Even though Pecola goes seemingly mad, she survives.  Her friend Claudia fights battles for her friend.  Pecola’s mother is also a survivor.  She endures years of abuse at her husband’s hands, and through a subservient job in order to provide, and in the end provides a home for Pecola who is unable to care for herself.  In Morrison’s story, the women survive and the men perish or run.

4.      Expert Reviews

-          Kirkus Review: “A skillfully understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.”
-          New York Times: “So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”
-          Newsweek: “This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl’s universe.”
-          The Detroit Free Press: “A profoundly successful work of fiction. Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth…it is an experience.”

5.      Connections

Other books by Toni Morrison:
-          (1973). Sula. Knopf. ISBN 1400033438
-          (1977). Song of Solomon. Alfred Knopf, Inc. ISBN 140003342X
-          (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 1400033411
-          (2012). Home. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 0307594165