Baby

               Beloved (the character, not the book) is almost a walking contradiction. She has the body of an 18-year-old woman, and with it the impulses and desires that come with the age, but mentally and behaviorally she often acts like an infant. She initiates sexual contact with Paul D, but she has no memories and does not speak much, almost never elucidating her thoughts clearly. This makes her relationship with Sethe quite complicated. She feels love and affection for her, and desires to have her all to herself, but she also might have used some supernatural powers to choke Sethe when they go outside. She despises Paul D as someone who pulls Sethe's attention away from herself, but she tempts him into having sex with her. With the revelation partway through the book that Beloved is Sethe's child that she murdered in an attempt to keep her away from slavery, the relationship takes on a whole new dimension. It becomes increasingly clear that Beloved is functionally incapable of explaining her feelings, but is terrified of the "dark place" she existed in during the interim between her murder and eventual reincarnation. She feels a bond towards her mother, but is emotionally stunted and sometimes lashes out in an attempt to stay close to Sethe.

                From her first appearance, it is clear that Beloved and Sethe share a special bond. Her emergence from the water coincides with Sethe out of the blue having an experience similar to her water breaking. Her behavior for the next few days mirrors that of a newborn almost exactly, and the few things we get from her perspective are a strong connection to Sethe, a sentiment that is captured with words even in thought by Beloved. Despite this connection, however, when Sethe takes Beloved and Denver to the clearing where Baby Suggs used to preach, she feels hands around her throat choking her. Beloved then comes to her rescue, kissing Sethe's neck and rubbing the bruises. Although Sethe is relieved to not be choked, she is also confused by Beloved's actions. Denver then in private accuses Beloved of doing the choking, although Beloved denies it. The whole situation is quite strange: why would Beloved choke her own mother and then come to kiss the bruises? Furthermore, why is Beloved's reaction to the choking so intimate? Even if she cannot explain herself, it is clear that Beloved does not express emotion and connection like anyone else in the novel, as her relationship with each of the other characters is quite strange. Part of it is her implied infancy, and that she has only been alive for roughly two years, but part of it is also what she represents that causes her to act the way she does. Her fate and current state of existence is due to the horror of slavery that Paul D and Sethe had to live through, and despite the love that Sethe and Beloved have for each other, everyone still feels discomfort and confusion dealing with their past demons in such a literal way. I have not read the book up to the end, but I would make a guess that this problem is not simply going to resolve itself, and that most likely more tragedy will occur before Beloved has anything close to a healthy relationship or existence.

Escape

                Beloved is a book about a time period so earth-shattering that its effects resonate through history, up to the time of the events in the novel and further up to the present day. Events like these, because of how utterly they dehumanized and terrorized the people involved, often create some sort of distance between those who suffered them and the rest of the world, as a method of coping with the situation that is presented to them. In order to talk about slavery, Toni Morrison presented a chronology that takes place mostly removed from slavery, occurring after its end, but showing that the event has irreparably damaged the fabric of its main characters' lives by using Sethe's murder of her own child as a symbol for the horror of slavery.

                The novel opens with an idiosyncratic line: "124 was haunted." The reader has no idea what this means at the beginning of the book, but what slowly begins to emerge as the first chapter is read is that 124 is the house that all of the characters live in, and that it is haunted by the ghost of a dead child. This concept of haunting is important - this ghost ranges from benign acts such as handprints in cakes they make to quite malicious acts such as hitting a dog against a wall so hard that its leg breaks. Sethe's sons leave because of this ghost, and her family is ostracized from the community for reasons unknown at the time, so for the most part she lives in complete isolation with her daughter - she can avoid speaking of or dealing with her memories in slavery.

                However, things become more complicated with the arrival of Paul D, one of the men who lived on the plantation with her. Interestingly enough, the dead infant Beloved manifests herself physically as a young woman almost as soon as Paul D shows up, as if they are both reminders of the past that she has tried to avoid. As the novel progresses, it also becomes increasingly clear that Sethe is the one who killed her own daughter, and that this is the reason for the community's ostracization and the haunting of her house. It is not until Paul D confronts her that the reader learns the reason why: the slave-catcher had come from the plantation to return them, and she was so horrified of returning to slavery that she attempted to kill her children and then herself in order to avoid that fate. Disgusted, the slave-catcher left and her family sans one member stayed relatively uninterrupted in their house until the present.

                With this information, the family's situation becomes much more clear. The community stays clear of her both because they are horrified of the murder and because the murder represents everything horrible about their lives in slavery that they tried to escape. By rejecting her, they are attempting to distance themselves from the lives in slavery that they escaped. However, Sethe does not have this option. After the murder of her child, Sethe is perpetually haunted by the event, and by extension her awful history. Then, she is forced to relive and evaluate these moments with the arrival of Paul D. While he represents moving forward with a new husband, he is also inextricably tied to the past with the events that they both witnessed. Beloved, too, carries both of these sentiments. As a young woman, she carries on a new future as a family-like unit for Sethe, but she is also literally the physical manifestation of the most horrible thing that has ever happened to Sethe. She is caught between her desire to distance herself from slavery and the unignorable facts that she must deal with: she killed her own baby. This is the horror that she must deal with, and this is the horror of slavery that Morrison presents in Beloved.

Killer

Hip-hop, since its inception, has constantly been a topic of fierce debate, within and outside the hip-hop community. Inside, graffiti artists, break-dancers, and especially rappers have been internally fighting over the legitimacy of various styles, rappers, and rhymes since the activities themselves began. Outside, uninitiated and often outraged members of society at large criticize and condemn hip-hop culture with concerns ranging from its legitimacy as a cultural movement and art form to the effect it has on children. Music in particular is a sore point between the two groups, as many adults were and are concerned with the influence hip-hop music has on youth culture. Such debates first began to heat up when NWA's Straight Outta Compton came out, and continued through gangsta rap to the perceived excesses and hedonism of modern rap. The chief concern seems to be "how can a bunch of thugs yelling about killing each other and owning money be art?" Indeed, while those inside the community would bristle at their entire community being cast in this light, few would deny that there is in fact rap music being produced and consumed that espouses these beliefs. When the issue is viewed in a racial light (as it often must be, given its origin and primary creators), opponents of hip-hop and rap generally come from two different camps: white Americans who believe such music is barbaric and harmful, and black Americans who view such music as harmful to the perception of black culture.

                The first group, the so-called moral guardians of society, tends to see rap as a whole as indicative of some sort of social malaise, where corrupt youth make this harmful music and their corruption spreads to other children who listen to it. This viewpoint is very clearly seen (in context of graffiti) by Koch, the mayor of New York, interviewed in Style Wars. He states that he believes that the vandalism in his city (and presumably analogs in music, though gangsta rap had not emerged yet) was not the result of youth with too much time on their hands, but instead youth with no moral compass. He viewed this culture as a scourge, something to be kept out of sight. However, some of the concerns of this group, while often voiced too contemptuously,  are valid concerns that many parents had to face. No one, black or white, rich or poor, wants their children listening to music which advocates violence and misogyny, and indeed many hip-hop songs released have been on this topic. However, the question that everyone has a much harder time answering is, "is it art?"

                The second group, while condemning much of popular hip-hop, often still embraces the notion of hip-hop as art. It is truly a black movement, almost entirely unaffected by white influence in terms of the actual music being produced (aside from a desire to consume, and therefore produce, "real" depictions of hood life). Many classic hip-hop artists, such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or A Tribe Called Quest, released music talking about issues of the day, and seeking to depict a message instead of glorifying violence. While popular music has drifted in and out of such topics, hip-hop discussing difficult topics has persisted near the spotlight to this day. However, the issue that many black community members have with popular hip-hop is that some see it as a sort of minstrelsy. Artists like Gucci Mane slather themselves in gold jewelry and outlandish clothing and women and in some ways seem like caricatures of themselves, and some people believe that this presents the black community in an unflattering light.

                Nobody anywhere has a clear answer on exactly how much of hip-hop is art, and on what makes some rap art and other rap not art. From the outside, listeners endlessly debate on its impact, and inside, figures prominent in hip-hop endlessly debate on whose style is legitimate and whether materialistic rap is in fact art or not. No matter how much they argue about it, hip-hop is here, and it is constantly being served to the ears and eyes of the populace at large. The movement as a whole considers itself art, and whether other people agree or not it will proliferate as long as the people within it continue to view it as the artistic release of choice. 

Dad

                Throughout most of the novel White Boy Shuffle, the Gunnar Kaufman describes the various events in his life with humor and sarcasm, making a joke out of anything and everything. He describes his extended family history as a tradition of cronyism to the white man, giving their saga almost as a comedy or farce with all of the humor he puts into it. However, the jokes stop completely one generation before his own, and for some reason Gunnar refuses to tell jokes about his father, another crony in the form of a criminal profiler for the LAPD, stating that it hits too close to home. This relationship with his father is quite enigmatic, and is expanded upon very rarely, but by closely examining it we can see many of Gunnar's fears and struggles in a more illuminating context.

                Aside from the introduction, the next mention of Gunnar's father occurs in his color vignettes about his early childhood. Most of the pieces are short and somewhat humorous poems about his life and the daily minutiae he experiences, but when he reaches "black," the tone immediately darkens. He heavily implies that he views himself as unwanted and useless, and then segues into a segment implying that his father molested him at some point in his childhood. This segment in between several humorous ones is so somber and intense that it is quite jarring and uncomfortable to read, and yet, as soon as it is over, it is never mentioned again. Gunnar moves on to his next topic with "after my father molested me" and that is the end of his discussion about the topic. This intensity and then return to the norm is  quite important for the development of Gunnar's character and psyche, however.

                Gunnar rarely mentions his father after this incident, but whenever he is mentioned he pointedly calls him phrases like "piece of shit" and tries to avoid him at all costs. In addition, the context of the rest of the vignette about "black" frames much of the internal conflict Gunnar feels. Many of the issues he faces, such as sexual identity and self-worth, take on a very different color when viewed in light of Gunnar's previous molestation. Indeed, his sense of blackness itself seems influenced by this, as his father was the model Kaufman in terms of living on the white man's terms. Gunnar's molestation by a man who had previously forced him to go along with white culture and racism could be part of the cause for the strong distaste in Gunnar's mouth for going along with the institution. The molestation, by being included in the "black" vignette, is implied to be a facet of his own blackness that he is ashamed of, and yet embraces in opposition to the oppressive culture that his father comes from.

                The second significant incident occurring with Gunnar's father occurs during the LA riots. After a humorous if not surreal foray into the streets and stores turns up little to nothing, Gunnar and his gang friends attempt to secure a safe from a building that is left in the nearby parking lot. The crew barely manages to load it into the truck before Gunnar's father, the cop, shows up and beats Gunnar severely. This event too is presented rather starkly, in contrast to the humor of the rest of the scene. A similar dynamic to the molestation can be seen here as well. Gunnar, wanting to belong to the black community of his friends, is beaten by his father, a black man who has completely embraced the white institution. In a way, Gunnar's father is beating him for being everything that he sees as wrong with "blackness." Of course, the reader has grown up with Gunnar, and recognizes this robbery not as a "black" action but as part of Gunnar's frustration and resentment at the white world, which has boiled over by letting Rodney King's killers free.  This contrast between Gunnar's emerging identity and the hate his father feels for Gunnar's rejection of the institution only cements Gunnar's anti-establishment views further, and pushes him further and further away from activities which he sees as affirming his place in white society, such as basketball player and later poet.

                Gunnar's father, interestingly enough, is mentioned at the very end of the novel. Gunnar wrote a poem about his father's suicide, presented strangely comically as literally swallowing the gun and choking on the trigger. The poem states that his father dreamed of equality and civil liberty but then "woke up and had to go to work," implying that his day to day concerns overrode his ideals. This captures Gunnar's father's attitude quite well, and frames him as someone who goes along with the institution because it's convenient and the path of least resistance. Gunnar has in contrast followed a path more resistant than perhaps anyone else, becoming a black messiah while completely rejecting any authority or identity such a title would give him. This desire to escape Kaufmanism, personified in Gunnar's father, presents a strong and compelling case for Gunnar's development as a man.

Reality

When reading most classical, or at least pre-World War II novels, the issue of "what reality is this" is barely worth considering. Most of the previous novels we have read in this class, with the partial exception of Invisible Man, have concretely taken place in the real world. For example, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, we never need to ask ourselves whether what is happening to Janie is realistic, or if Tea Cake could actually acquire a guitar. However, White Boy Shuffle, a much more contemporary novel, regularly raises questions such as these. Right from the beginning, Beatty plays with our suspension of disbelief, stating to the reader that he is a messiah to black people, their unwilling savior. Initially this can be laughed off, but by the end of the book it is quite clear that he is literally their messiah, and they await his every word to make their next move. For this reason, this novel falls squarely into the territory "postmodern novel."

                It is not useful to bandy about such terms without a clear understanding of what exactly they mean first. A postmodern novel, in contrast to a Modernist novel, is usually written after World War II, and is more concerned with the nature of the narrative's reality and its interaction with other realities (such as our own) as opposed to a Modernist novel's concern with the subjectivity of the narrator. In a postmodern novel, events that are wildly implausible are often woven into historical scenes or backgrounds to give a different perspective on the chosen subject. White Boy Shuffle regularly employs all of these techniques.

                One of the most notable scenes in the novel, where the strange world that Gunnar lives in intersects our world, is when the LA riots begin and Gunnar feels a rage awaken inside himself. Driven to action, he flocks to the street to begin looting and causing general mayhem. The chapter is patently ridiculous - at one point he and his friend Nicholas Scoby stop a truck driver and beat him senseless with loaves of bread. However, the real events that occurred, such as store looting, are placed in this distorted lens to glean new observations. For example, Gunnar goes to an electronics store to rob it, but finds inside an orderly line where looters wait one by one to receive their plunder before casually strolling out. At another point, the Korean woman in Gunnar's neighborhood burns her own store down after the neighbors refuse to burn it down because "she's too black."  This scene, while on the surface quite funny, recontextualizes the riots as a reasonable if not somewhat violent frustration within the black community about their continued oppression.

                Many scenes which are on the surface hilarious are re-interpretations of accepted tropes and social stereotypes. Possibly the most memorable is Gunnar Kaufman's resident gang, the Gun Totin' Hooligans. Aside from the strangely self-referential name, the gang refuses to fight with guns, resorting instead to medieval and unorthodox weapons. At one point, in some twisted, Wagner-be-damned interpretation of the Ride of the Valkyries and gang shoot-outs, the group dresses in drag, drives up to a rival gang, flirts with them and then proceeds to fight them with such instruments as a bleach-filled balloon attached to a crossbow bolt. This scene is worth reading multiple times, because it not only is the depth Gunnar's gang throws themselves into this con hilarious ("I bet your panties are wet, bro"), it also gives a completely different take on gang violence than is normally given. In this bizarre alternate world, gang conflict is not just senseless shootings, it is a sense of honor, a brigade like any army would lead. It is quite important to them. The scene's take on masculinity is also worth noting. The gang is willing to dress fully in drag and commit to femininity for some time, flirting with the members of the rival gang before fighting them, and finishing by singing opera with the radio. Gang culture is traditionally seen as hyper-masculine, almost to the point where it's the primary message presented, but this scene instead casts gangsters as a group of friends who like to goof around and have fun, even if it means quite serious violence.

                There are many, many more examples of the strange reality that Gunnar Kaufman inhabits, but the message to take from the overall theme of differing reality is that Beatty is attempting to re-interpet reality by presenting a reality that is stranger than our own. By regularly making us ask, "is this really happening? Could this really happen?" he is forcing us to examine the event in our own lives as well. Basketball culture, gang life, and what it means to be black are all warped so deeply in this book that we have to ask at some point, "well, what does it mean that Gunnar is preternaturally gifted at basketball and that even though he is literally the black messiah all he wants to do is die?" Only in the answer to these questions can we begin to understand the reality in White Boy Shuffle, and by extension our own reality.

Romance

Zora Neale Hurston is almost certainly a very well-read author. Her seminal work, Their Eyes Were Watching God breaks new ground in its subject matter and location, but it uses themes and modes common to many previous canon works. One prime example of this is the somewhat Romantic theme of true love in a marriage as opposed to marriage by necessity. Janie Starks marries a man at the very young age of 16, and due to the awakening of the desire for true passion within her, is unhappy in her marriage. She feels that romance and a man she loves is vital for a marriage, while her grandmother believes that stability and safety is the most important part of a marriage. Based on this ideological difference, Janie runs away from her husband and goes through the events depicted in the novel. Yet for some reason, even though such themes are commonly accepted as standard fare for a Romantic novel, I have never liked Romantic novels like this, and for the same reason I so far dislike Their Eyes Were Watching God.

My distaste for novels like this began in Sophomore English. The broad subject was British literature, and of course the Romantic era covered a large part of British literature, so we read several books from this time. Some of them, such as Frankenstein, were alright, and I read these with some difficulty but got through them. However, others, such as Wuthering Heights, were just not to my liking at all. I am pretty good at struggling through books that I don’t like when I need to, but this book just stood like a brick wall before me. Heathcliff and Catherine’s eternal love was supposed to be the driving force of the whole book, but it never seemed important to me, and the novel just seemed so small. There was so little happening, so little in the characters that I could identify with, that I just couldn’t finish the book. Maybe I am not particularly romantic, but the theme of lost love was not enough for me to work with.

                Their Eyes Were Watching God of course takes a different perspective on this theme. Janie does not simply want to be with a man and exist as his wife; she wants to be in true love, but she realizes that this requires personal freedom on her part and she doesn’t want to be subservient to a man. However, the novel is still in many ways about love, in a somewhat Romantic light, and I have a lot of trouble identifying with this. Maybe my scope of reading is a little limited, but something about this theme seems so limited itself, compared to the grandeur of a book like Invisible Man. A novel about how each person fits into society (or doesn’t) that takes its protagonist through a variety of ridiculous situations and that is wry in the levels of metaphor that implies just seems more interesting to me. I just don’t connect with the quest for love as a theme in a novel

Freedom

Many people see Their Eyes Were Watching God as one of the seminal works in African-American literature. Given Hurston's relentless dedication to depicting Southern black life in rural communities, this is a reasonable light to view the book in. However, others make the case that this novel is primarily a racial novel, and this a point that I would have to dispute. While there are certainly racial elements of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character is not constantly seeking to understand her life in the context of race. Indeed, the topic of race and racism is not brought up often at all, and only in passing. One modern reading of the novel that does align with Janie's struggles, though, is a feminist context. Janie is perpetually in a struggle between her desire to find "true love" and her desire to remain independent and not be subjugated by any man she is with. Every large event that Janie experiences ties into this quest to be a free woman, and for this reason, I believe that Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the first feminist novels.

                The first indication that this novel gives us about its gender themes is in the opening passage. The narrator of the novel begins with a broad statement about men and women. Men are constantly looking for boats on the horizon, seeking their destiny afar and by travel and experience. Women, meanwhile, stay at home and watch men leave. With this statement, the narrator is affirming rather poetically traditional gender roles. Men are adventurers, explorers, and they are the ones doing all the action. Women simply wait. However, this idea is almost instantly subverted by the introduction of the protagonist, Janie Starks. She is introduced as attractive, yet scorned by many in the community for having a relationship with a younger man. She has mud-caked overalls, and she has returned from hard work in the Everglades. This is clearly not a woman anything like the gender divide specified in the opening paragraph.

                However, when the narrator shows us the chronological beginning of the story, with Janie as a young girl, she is much different than the character shown in the first chapter. She simply is a young teenager, just hit puberty, who instantly becomes enamored with the idea of true love, and wants to have a relationship with a man that will be idealized, romantic, and will knock her off of her feet. Her grandmother, her guardian, instantly bucks at this when she sees Janie kissing a boy over the fence. In her mind, Janie should not be concerned with true love, because she grew up in slavery, and her idea of the perfect life for her granddaughter was a stable husband, who could provide for her. Janie (and many readers) disagree strongly with her idea of freedom as a providing husband, but in some ways this lays the background for Janie's development into a woman. Janie's grandmother is clearly an independent woman, having escaped slavery and raised Janie's mother on the run. Their disagreement on true love is indicative of the further freedom Hurston believes a woman needs, i.e. the ability to love who she wants to love and not just the man who can give her a house, but Janie arguably would not have been able to run away and seek her fate at all had she not had a grandmother as a role model who did a somewhat similar thing: escaping a situation that she believed prevented her freedom.

                When Janie left her first husband, a humble, homely farmer with a respectable sixty-acre plot, she left him for a smooth-talking man passing through town, and she ended up still not being free. However, time passed, and she began to understand more exactly what it was that she wanted. As a sixteen-year-old, she frankly had almost no idea of what love was, other than that her marriage had none. It took years of marriage to a man almost the polar opposite of her first husband for her to realize what was missing from both marriages: her agency to do things. In the first marriage, she was required to work the land with her husband to survive. This was not out of the ordinary for a farmer's wife, and the requests he was making were not unreasonable, but his sweet-talking ended quickly and she was left with a man who she didn't love that made her work hard. She felt like she had no freedom. In contrast, her second husband pampered and wooed her, but it soon became apparent that she was supposed to exist as his wife, not as a human being. She wasn't allowed to talk to the people or even let her hair down, and she had no agency in this relationship either. When her husband eventually died (after twenty years) she knew that all she wanted was agency. She was going to be beholden to no man.

                This idea, while easy to grasp now, was somewhat radical in Hurston's time. Feminism was not a household word, and a woman free to enter relationships with multiple men and seek her own destiny was not a woman that society would readily accept. However, strangely enough, much of the concern about the novel's feminism was almost totally overshadowed by the novel's purported racial content. Richard Wright was so furious about the novel's "shameful" depiction of the modern black person that the novel failed in all aspects in his eyes. Because the novel was written by a black woman, about black people, critics analyzed the novel almost entirely in a racial context and missed the budding sense of female identity and self-determination. These themes, not the racial themes so commonly touted in Their Eyes Were Watching God, are the themes that stick.

Dialect

                Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in part as an attempt to document and capture the lives of African-American men and women in the deep South. These people, having  remained in the South instead of emigrating to the North, and leaving much of their culture and tradition behind when they did emigrate to the city, existed in a world largely unseen by the average American reader. Hurston received funding to travel throughout the South and document their traditions, partially to preserve them for future generations and partially as material for her fiction. Their Eyes Were Watching God reflects many of these traditions, but the most instantly apparent and often confusing aspect of Southern life in this book is the pervasive use of dialect. The novel's characters speak quite fluently in vernacular, and the text depicts their often nonstandard grammar, accents, and complex idioms. Even the third person narrator takes on aspects of the vernacular at points during the book, when following characters particularly closely.

                The first question that Hurston's contemporary readers, and indeed many modern readers ask, is "Why dialect?" The contractions, omissions of letters, and word choices force the reader to analyze sentences audibly instead of visually, and many of the sayings are so obscure and removed from their meaning that they cannot be understood without close attention to context. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is almost instantly confused by the conversations, and must read them multiple times to figure out what the characters are saying and how they are saying it.

                However, by midway through the book, the dialect is almost unnoticeable. It seems almost as if the characters are speaking aloud in the reader's head, and most of the difficulties aforementioned have slipped away as the grammar has been seen to be consistent and the dialogue reflective of actual speech patterns. At some point, the dialect stops removing us from the scene and starts bringing us in closer, by creating a somewhat film-like attention to depict exactly what the characters are not saying, and not paraphrasing it in any way.

                Another example of a book which uses its own confusing lexicon is A Clockwork Orange. The protagonist and narrator, Alex, speaks in a British-Russian slang that employs religious use of Cockney rhyming slang, Russian loanwords. When the novel begins, the reader is literally incapable of understanding half of the words (most of the slang is not English), but the reader quickly catches on to the patterns of the language and by the end, the reader and the narrator are using the same vocabulary entirely. One side effect of this is that the protagonist, who is quite a morally reprehensible man, in some ways pulls us into his world and makes us understand him in a way that we would not if he were speaking standard English. A parallel can be drawn here with Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston's contemporaries, especially white ones, might not understand or be willing to immerse themselves in Southern black culture. By using dialect, the reader is implicitly drawn into the conversations the characters have, and by making the effort to learn the speech patterns and expressions, can identify with the characters more readily.

                Dialect also possesses another quality that must have appealed to Hurston. In many ways, the vernacular present in Southern communities is an artifact just as much as their folklore and customs are. As an anthropologist, Hurston made note of the games that the people played, the ceremonies for weddings and religion, and the stories that they told. If she wanted to fully capture the extent of Southern culture, representing the language that they spoke must have also been vital, for it is as likely to disappear as the other customs people leave behind when they leave the South. To preserve it, she likely felt it important to include the dialect in her novel. Their culture might have been preserved, but without the language, it would be almost impossible to place yourself in their shoes.

History Repeats Itself

Invisible Man can be thought of as a coming-of-age novel, in many ways. Ellison chronicles the narrator's life from the shamelessly humble, naive boy in the rural south to the cynical, anti-authoritarian man living in an abandoned basement at the edge of Harlem. Each subsequent step in his life removes him farther and farther from where he came from, and his outlook on life changes with each new disappointment. Why, then, do events that are so similar happen over and over again? The narrator fights a battle royal in a boxing ring in the first chapter, then gives a speech in the fifteenth chapter in a boxing ring, and then gets into another chaotic brawl in the next chapter. He scrambles for coins after the fight, and then sees a racist antique that gobbles coins for doing tricks much later in the novel. He sees a then-unknown man named Ras giving a speech on the street, wondering if it would incite a riot, and then himself later gives a speech on the street that leads to a riot! The book is packed with these deja-vu moments, and while some of them are explicitly acknowledged, others fly farther under the radar, and leave the reader with the feeling that time repeats itself with similar circumstances over and over, and the narrator must grow from these permutations or follow them indefinitely.

The first big event that looms in the book's consciousness is the battle royal. Right in the first chapter, the narrator is forced to fight with ten other boys before giving the speech he was supposed to give on racial humility. He stumbles blindfolded through a smoky boxing ring, randomly punching and trying to avoid being hit before scrambling for coins on the floor. By the time he gives his speech, he is literally swallowing blood, a powerful metaphor for his own acceptance of the brutal racism of the South. When he much later joins the brotherhood, he hopes for a life free of such things, or at least free from the poverty that he is living in when he takes the job. However, Ellison apparently does not think so highly of the brotherhood. After the narrator joins, he becomes aware of a black Americana bank in his room, which grins and does a trick to put coins in its mouth. The connection is not explicitly drawn, but the narrator feels instantly ashamed of and angry at the "self-mocking image," one which the reader instantly compares to the coin-grabbing frenzy of the opening chapter. The bank even grins grotesquely, reminiscent of the narrator's forced smile as he swallowed down blood to give a speech on racial humility. The comparison is clear: on some symbolic, subconscious level, Ellison is implying that the narrator is still doing cheap tricks for coins.

Right after this, the narrator gives his debut speech with the Brotherhood, which is, surprisingly enough, in an old boxing ring. The narrator even pointedly compares this to the opening chapter, but does not make a judgment on the similarity. He also notices a picture of a boxer who was blinded in a rigged boxing match, and then died unable to receive compensation. When the narrator goes up to speak, the lights shine and he too is blinded, just like the boxer, and, more darkly, just like in the opening chapter. This time, however, he speaks not what the Brotherhood wants him to speak about, but instead rhetoric about dispossession and blindness, a topic that welled up from within himself. It appears the narrator has grown.

This growth is soon eclipsed, however. In the very next chapter, the narrator goes to rally at an eviction, and along comes Ras and a gang of his followers. The scene almost instantly devolves into a brawl, with people blindly fighting each other. A comparison is drawn again to the battle royal in the first chapter, and the comparison is later strengthened by Ras' speech. He warns them that they are black men fighting against black men, which the white man has made them do. This is almost exactly what happened in the first chapter, and Ellison seems to be implying again that the Brotherhood is again using the narrator, and making him fight with other men for their own gain, just like the white men did at the battle royal. Ras, however, urges the narrator to realize this and pursue his own cause, and it seems that the speech has a strong effect on the narrator. Whether he will escape the cycle or continue to be trapped in a white man's world remains to be seen.

This constant re-imagining and repetition of uncannily similar events seems to show the reader that the narrator is still caught within the confines of the white man's world. It does not seem as if he is doomed to repeat them forever, but the fact that similar things keep happening to him implies that he must learn something from the flow of time if he wishes to not endlessly be caught in a cycle of brawls and blindness. It is up to the reader to decide critically how far they think he is from escaping, if he ever will. 

Melting Clocks

Throughout Invisible Man, one immediately apparent aspect of the novel is its continued commitment to depicting events in not strictly realistic terms. It's not as if the chain of events that is shown in the novel is literally impossible, just somewhat unlikely. From the very beginning of the novel, where the protagonist reveals he lives in the basement of an apartment building surrounded by 1369 glowing lightbulbs, we are thrust into a world we don't entirely understand, one that is close to ours but is just slightly off-kilter. In addition to single instances in the novel seeming strange, there is also a thread of interconnectivity that runs through the narrator's entire life, much more than would occur in real life or even in a realistic novel. For example, the narrator is told early in the book by Mr. Norton to look to Emerson for self-realization. Then, much later, the narrator seeks a job from a Mr. Emerson, who gives him a job with Liberty...paint company. It is this weird, almost dreamlike filter that the novel presents the world in that allows the narrator and the reader to analyze the serious issues presented in the novel, such as racism.

A prime example of the completely surreal nature of Invisible Man comes very early in the book. In chapter one, the narrator is invited to give a speech on humility and strength through obedience to a group of white men. However, when he gets there, he is first required to box with other young black men in a boxing arena. As he is brought out, he sees a smoky room full of screaming white men, and then a naked, beautiful blonde woman with a tattoo of an American flag on her navel is brought out. This riles up the boxers and the audience, and as the woman crowdsurfs her way out of the ring, the boxers are blindfolded and begin fighting. This is clearly not something that would happen in real life, and vague symbolism lies scattered throughout the section, such as the American flag tattoo, or the electrified coins the young men dive for that end up being brass advertisements, but this dreamlike episode the narrator goes through allows the reader to think critically about what Ellison is really trying to say. It is obvious that he isn't implying there are secret Battle Royales that plague the South, but at the same time there is an implicit judgment here about how the black community is made to fight each other, and is forced to do tricks to receive petty cash (an idea that pops up much, much later when the narrator encounters a similarly surreal black Americana coin bank). It is only because the event is so ridiculous that we are forced to think of it as symbolic, not as a realist attempt at telling a story.

Back to the Roots

When I first came across the album Undun, by The Roots, I had not ever listened to them before. The only reason I decided to listen to the album at all was that I heard it had been enormously well received, and I wanted to see what all of the fuss about. I instantly realized when I started listening that it was of value musically, but it took me to the end of the album before I realized that the album merited discussion in the context of African American literature. Technically, it is a hip-hop album, not a book or print work, but it still dealt with many of the themes I had noticed reading Native Son.

The album needs some context to be understood as a full story. It chronicles (backwards) the life of Redford Stevens, a fiction hustler who rises from the streets to become rich, famous, and eventually die. Of this last fact, the listener is made instantly clear: the album opens with the sound of a heartbeat monitor, as the narrator looks back on his life and wonders if he will be remembered. The inevitability of death presented here resonates with the strong element of naturalism in Native Son, in that no matter what happens to the characters inside, the outcome is always death. 

As the album continues from this dark start, the narrator is presented as living large, with money and drugs, reminiscent of the idealized gangsta lifestyle, but Redford is anything except at peace. Instead, he is portrayed as always anxious and unsure of his lifestyle: "I'd give it all for peace of mind, for Heaven's sake/ My heart's so heavy that the ropes that hold my casket break." Redford is a man that cannot live freely, and feels burdened by the choices he has made. This is a much harsher, more incisive view of the gang lifestyle than is presented as the mainstream ideal, and this perspective is not only more interesting as it is different, but makes for a much more engaging story. Redford not a "thug," he is a person that is constantly evaluating his own life choices, and this is a character that is much more complex and realistic. 

Where do all of these decisions that Redford has made come from? Farther in the album, as we back deeper and deeper through his life on the street, we come to his experiences as a lowly street-level drug dealer, and here we can see the motivation to live the life that he led. in "Tip the Scales," Redford asserts that he believes crime and eventually prison or death are the only options that he has: "The scales of justice ain't equally weighed out/ only two ways out, digging tunnels or digging graves out." The implication is that the system of justice is skewed, and that the only way for him to make anything out of himself is crime. This is a message that feels at home in Native Son, as Bigger Thomas felt somewhat similarly in that he planned on robbing a white man's store and then killed a white woman because it is the only thing he could do. This goes beyond naturalism, however. The story also works on an almost Greek tragedy level: Redford has an inevitability to his death that fate has determined, and he constantly struggles in his life with the decision to commit crime that he has made. This album presents this story fantastically, and I recommend it to anyone looking for music to listen to.