AA Lit Stefania

The scene in which the narrator must burn the contents of his briefcase in order to get out of the dark basement – finds enlightenment, perhaps you could say, is an interesting way to conclude that part of the book. As readers, we could all probably see that the objects building up in the narrator’s briefcase weren’t going to amount to nothing, especially with the deep symbolic significance of each of them, as well as the trouble the narrator had letting go of them. For a briefcase for which he ran into a burning building for no reason but that it had been with him through everything so far, the burning of (most of) its contents was a surprisingly quiet ending. There were no more speeches or declarations, just the narrator quietly, privately, letting go. It seemed as if the narrator’s detachment from the world as set up by his reflections on invisibility, was continuing.   Of course, as soon as the narrator discovers that Jack wrote the note telling the narrator that there were...

The Brotherhood’s racism is shown even in first few scenes featuring it, with Jack angrily commenting on how race is all that, he insinuates, black people, ever talk about. Without giving us time to breathe, another scene comes up, showing the crowd of Brotherhood members’ reaction to a tipsy man asking that the narrator sing for him and yelling racial stereotypes at him as other members lead him out of the room and try to quiet him. Moving past the fact that an openly racist member is in the organization at all, the main concern of everyone else in the room is shutting down the man and hiding his words from the narrator, rather than the fact that a member is racist. They simultaneously react in an extremely awkward and unproductive manner, while also trying to assure the narrator that this is a small insignificant case not worth any worry and that some members just aren’t quite caught up. A woman comes up to him, basically saying that she agrees with the drunk man’s opinions but expla...

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...