That One Escalator (Sasha)

In Beloved , the central scene of the novel, Sethe’s killing of Beloved herself and her attempt to kill the rest of her children, is first narrated from the perspective of “the men without skin”, Schoolteacher, his nephew, the slave-catcher, and the sheriff. But why? Why change our perspective to that of a character completely isolated from everyone else, who believes our characters to be profoundly inferior and worth only what he can extract from them?   And then, why does this happen again at the end of the novel? Why does Morrison switch again to the perspective of a (very different) white character for the scene of Beloved’s disappearance? In both cases, the radical switch in perspective massively alienates the readers from the characters we have spent the rest of the book with. We are forced to see Schoolteacher’s thoughts from his perspective, forced immediately to understand why he makes the decision to abandon all of the children along with Sethe. This is i...

       Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God has 3 primary community settings: Janie’s hometown, Eatonville, and the Muck. Janie’s independence and self-realization is closely tied to her engagement in these communities, which increases over the course of the novel. In Janie’s hometown, we learn almost nothing about the wider community. We know that Janie was raised in close proximity to the single white family, which we know may have isolated her to some degree from the rest of the town. We also know that a major party was thrown for the town when she and Logan were married. Other than that, however, we know essentially nothing about the community. After her encounter with Taylor, one of only a few named characters in the early chapters, Janie is shipped off to Logan, who lives far away from the rest of the town, and does not interact with his neighbors much if it all. Janie, as we know, quickly runs away with Jody, and settles in Eatonville,...

        I’m back with yet another Invisible Man blog post. Why have I not written on any other book? Not really sure. But, this is a topic that I’ve been wanting to do a blog post or essay about for a while now, because it was extremely noticeable and interesting for me, but never figured out how to turn into a coherent longer form argument. I’m here to talk about clothes in Invisible Man , and their relation to the characters we see and the story overall. As stated in the documentary we watched, Ellison himself paid very close attention to his clothes, and dressed in a very particular, “Ivy” manner. That Ellison paid careful attention to formal clothing is quite apparent throughout Invisible Man , and Ellison repeatedly uses the narrator’s changes of clothes, as well as the clothes of those around him, to send messages about the character’s state and current role in society.   The first mention of clothing in the novel comes during the Battle R...

To me, in all honesty, Invisible Man still has a strangely and profoundly dreamlike character. Our main character continually tries to establish himself, but is undercut in bizarre and nonsensical ways throughout, while even his attempts to slip away from the world provoke strange responses.   The narrator’s experience with the brotherhood exemplify this pattern extremely clearly. He is promoted to a high office in an organization he does not really understand (nor ever understands or is allowed to understand) and is then repeatedly criticized and shamed for failing to uphold the proper ideals of said organization. Only after one such failure for which he is criticized is he sent to Hambro, to be educated, but we, like with his college experience, see none of this. We learn only that he is successful enough in his education to be given his job back, followed by it being taken away again, and him reassigned to “The Woman Question”. This chapter too, is bizarre. We are...

        In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man , we are presented with several different characters whoa attempt to push our narrator to become a “race leader”. Of these, the most important so far are probably Mary and Mr. Bledsoe. These two characters present similar views, but treat the narrator in radically different ways. Bledsoe is a terrifying force in the narrator’s life, who punishes him repeatedly for harming his interests and what he believes are the interests of “the race”.   Mary, on the other hand, while also a profound force in the narrator’s life, which he describes as such, is infinitely more caring and less hostile. She allows the narrator a place in her home for free, where he is allowed to stay for months on end, without fulfilling his obligations in terms of rent to her. She believes in the narrator, and in every previous person who has stayed in her house. Bledsoe believes in no one except for himself. For him, the narrator, like for ...

       In class this week, we talked extensively about Chapter 1 of Invisible Man as an extended dream sequence, a nightmare that our main character is entirely unaware of, and instead processes as completely normal. I will propose, however, that essentially every chapter has been like this, even the prologue, where we see a seemingly awake and self-conscious character. I think the nature of the dream-like state is different in each of the chapters, but overall each gives off the same feeling of semi-reality.   We begin in the prologue, where our main character, the narrator, describes himself as an invisible man, who no others can see, and explains that he discovered this for himself. Throughout the chapter, however, increasingly bizarre things come to light about the characters position and actions. First, we learn that he has installed 1,369 lightbulbs in his secret apartment, with which he wages war against the local power company, and is plann...

Well, new year and a new English class so from here on out I'll be using this page for African-American Lit blog posts.