While in class today, we brought up the ironic way that the narrator is had totally renounced his dream of being Bledsoe and truly believes that he is making his won way in the world--forging his own deer path. He has gotten away from the college (though not of his own free will) and gotten this radical new job (again not really his own doing) and is now acting spokesman for the Harlem chapter of this enigmatic-ideologied "Brotherhood" raising hell for the policemen and riots everywhere--but not of his own free will. He is acting according to the mask (and name) that have been assigned to him. So, he's furious with Bledsoe for the expulsion and rather uncouth letters, and is determined to get revenge (he dumps a spittoon over the head of an unfortunate reverend who vaguely resembles the headmaster) and while he tries to not be like him he still has this obsession with Bledsoe's character. He keeps a similar piece of memorabilia on his desk, and considers investing in a matching Bledsoe homburg hat. He cannot get rid of this man's character, whether he ends up despising it or emulating it, he cannot shake it.
In this sense the narrator resembles Bigger very strongly. He is caught in the same maze like a rat; having little control over where he is and what he does and even who he is, everything seems predetermined to go sour for him, even when he does everything right. (This is part of what makes the novel seem Kafkaesque--dreamlike in that everything goes smoothly then suddenly collapses without cause and ridiculous things happen to the poor bugger). Anyway, I just think that both just have some serious issues with control in their lives--though its kind of funny: we know the ending prematurely in both cases and at least this situation works out better for our narrator than poor Bigger.
One way to look at it (and I think I said something to this effect in class yesterday) is that Wright takes such a dim view of free will, and Bigger's world is almost claustrophobic, it's so narrowly constrained. His maze is quite small, and easier to see AS a maze. Ellison gives his character a MUCH wider range of movement (or *apparent* movement), and a wider range of roles to play, so it's not as easy to see the ways his free will is limited. This is where the novel's (indeed Kafkaesque) irony comes into play--we see more than the narrator does, with regard to his own circumstances. By now, we see the "boomerang" coming . . .
ReplyDelete(But keep this question in mind all the way through to the end of the novel--does he end up breaking out of this feedback loop? Does his withdrawal from society constitute a kind of taking control of his circumstances?)