Today in class, we discussed some of our points of confusion within the text.
One of them was when, after the narrator comes out of the bushes after the night in Harlem, he falls down into a hole. The narrator thinks they are cops because they are white, but they are only regular men who want to join in on the looting. The narrator, as soon as he realizes they aren’t cops, turns to run and falls into an open hole. He ends up realizing that there is nowhere else he can go, and it becomes the place where he has an epiphany about his life. This is the same hole where he is living at the beginning of the book, in the prologue.
Important quote: “This is the way it’s always been, only now I know it”
Other times when the narrator has been trapped in darkness by white people:
When he was in the hospital in chapter 11, and he couldn’t move or leave, or even remember his name, and he was being kept there and watched by white people.
His entire life, he has been trapped in his own metaphoric “hole”, and the ideas and actions of white people kept a lid on his self-expression. He has always been stuck, in a way, because everything that happened to him in life was controlled by other people.
Examples:
This is an article from The Huffington Post on a similar, but more modern topic:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-christie/post_1156_b_775111.html
We discussed the American Dream, and whether or not it is accessible to all people in this country. We agreed that, at least according to Ellison, the likelihood that a person will be successful in this country depends on which social group you belong to and where you were born. Some people are born in situations which make them more likely to reach the idyllic “American Dream”.
We also discussed that the symbol of his castration during the dream sequence can be seen as a representation of the narrator's loss of identity. He retaliates by telling them that they have stopped him from creating more generations of people for them to oppress. He expresses hope that the next generations will not be as oppressed as this generation.
One of them was when, after the narrator comes out of the bushes after the night in Harlem, he falls down into a hole. The narrator thinks they are cops because they are white, but they are only regular men who want to join in on the looting. The narrator, as soon as he realizes they aren’t cops, turns to run and falls into an open hole. He ends up realizing that there is nowhere else he can go, and it becomes the place where he has an epiphany about his life. This is the same hole where he is living at the beginning of the book, in the prologue.
Important quote: “This is the way it’s always been, only now I know it”
Other times when the narrator has been trapped in darkness by white people:
When he was in the hospital in chapter 11, and he couldn’t move or leave, or even remember his name, and he was being kept there and watched by white people.
His entire life, he has been trapped in his own metaphoric “hole”, and the ideas and actions of white people kept a lid on his self-expression. He has always been stuck, in a way, because everything that happened to him in life was controlled by other people.
Examples:
- When he was sent to college by a wealthy white man, only to be expelled for something that was out of his control
- When he was sent into the city with false hope that he would get a job
- The Brotherhood used him as a figurehead and made his decisions for him
This is an article from The Huffington Post on a similar, but more modern topic:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-christie/post_1156_b_775111.html
We discussed the American Dream, and whether or not it is accessible to all people in this country. We agreed that, at least according to Ellison, the likelihood that a person will be successful in this country depends on which social group you belong to and where you were born. Some people are born in situations which make them more likely to reach the idyllic “American Dream”.
We also discussed that the symbol of his castration during the dream sequence can be seen as a representation of the narrator's loss of identity. He retaliates by telling them that they have stopped him from creating more generations of people for them to oppress. He expresses hope that the next generations will not be as oppressed as this generation.
The next scribe is: Jordan Tucker
Love'd the organization of fact.
ReplyDeleteI feel that you missed something on the castration idea...
I think it was the idea that they hurt themselves by killing him.
Removing his genitals means the whites no longer have any more people to control and they hurt themselves by hurting him.