AA Lit Stefania

Ellison has a way of making some scenes in his book, often the most symbolism-heavy ones, have a dream like, or rather, often nightmarish, quality. Dramatic scenes tip over into absurdity, and, as Mr. Mitchell phrased it, not too many steps from comedic depictions. Even though the violence in the book serves a completely serious and consequential purpose in the book, Ellison choses to take us further from hyper-realistic description and further from the characters' point of view.  The first scene with this quality was the Battle Royal chapter, where teeth were falling out and blood was pouring and bodies jerked as they were electrified. While many authors make violence and pain gruesome and and realistic by adding in more detail about smaller aspects of it, Ellison almost goes the opposite direction - he adds in tons of baseline descriptions of the events taking place, but only surface level physical feelings of the characters. Readers cringe in discomfort as the narrator swallows ...

            Joining the class late, I was only present for a discussion or two on Native Son , and was still in the process of finishing the book up as I watched classmates dissect the author’s intention. One of the topics that got a lot of takes stood out to me, and pretty drastically changed the way I read the rest of the book. A lot of people consider the author’s one-dimensional characters, especially the female characters, to be a flaw of the book and an oversight on the author’s part. People mentioned how Bessie’s death was used in the novel as a simple prop to the story, and how she and Biggers mother and sister got little character development, and I expected the novel to go a very different direction. I expected Bessie’s usage in the investigation to simply be described in the novel, and the opinions that classmates had about how unfair to her that was, to have been drawn from their own interpretations. But when I got to the page, Wright sta...