Go Janie Go

            Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, represents a strong, straight-backed feminist character. This being the first novel that we have read in class this year that is both written by a woman and starring one as well, I really appreciate her strength compared to that of Bessie or the ever-seducing female members of Ellison's Brotherhood. Not only did she feel that she had the right to carve out her own fate when she left Logan Killicks, but she later changed even that decision by finally standing up to the insecure Joe Starks who once treated her so nicely. Mr. Starks is the man who promised her the world and more and made her a figure to be admired around town as the mayor's wife, isolated her from the entire town by painting her as this aloof, conceited woman. It seems as if he is doing this on purpose, not only to enure that others see them as a power couple, but to discourage anyone from befriending Janie, and thus keeping her reliant on him. He keeps her under a lock and key; no allowing her to speak her mind in social discussions on the sore porch, rather asking her to fetch him things, such as his black shoes, because according to Joe Starks, that is a woman's job. His control complex becomes even more obvious as they both age, and he makes continuous negative comments about her looks: putting her down so that he can feel better about his receding hairline and large saggy stomach.

           This all comes crashing down on him when it builds up to a breaking point for Janie, so that she can either retain an ounce of pride or submit to him entirely, and due to her strength she chooses the first option. Her comment of retaliation, which insulted a part of his anatomy that he formerly took pride in, had me as a reader egging her on and rooting for her entirely. In fact, this display of fiestiness reminded me very strongly of Zora Neale Hurston herself. It was not surprising to find a lot of herself in her character because there are obvious parallels between her life and Janie's, (such as both of them living in a tiny all-black town in Florida called Eatonville). In "Jump at the Sun" they mentioned that Zora could do tricks with the way she spoke, going from the accented, typically African American dialect to practically professorial English and back again. This is also evident in her novel, because the narration does exactly the same thing.

 There were some people who expressed the idea that because Janie disregarded "all" that Logan Killicks had done for her and ran off with Joe Starks, she was spoiled (thereby agreeing with Killicks). I disagree, mainly on the point that she never really agreed to marry him, and she wasn't happy there. Her life living in the back yard of a white family's house was not what you would call idyllic, but, like most girls of her age, she wasn't used to doing hard physical labor every day in addition to house chores. Her disgust for Logan may not have been entirely warranted on his half, but Janie deserved to be happy, and by her definition, not just her well-meaning Nanny's.

To anyone who thinks Janie is spoiled: when was the last time you worked all day behind a plow?

(Backtracking) The Blindness of Brother Jack

           I just discovered some symbolism from Invisible Man that I hadn't noticed the first time around, but if everyone else already did, then just humor me here. Brother Jack only has one eye. This could be referencing his "blindness" when it comes to the narrator. He doesn't really see the narrator as his own person, rather as a tool with excellent speaking skills and the right amount of pigment in his skin to use him to get some (controlled) amount of equality, (or at least keep up the front that that is what he wants). The narrator is totally invisible to Brother Jack just as he is to everyone else in the novel, but this conceited puffed-up dictator (of an "equality" organization--how ironic) literally cannot see him.
       
          So not only is Brother Jack blind, in a sense, but the narrator finds his habit of popping his eye out in a very Mad-Eye Moody way utterly repulsive. This is an addition to the outlandish and often grotesque images that Ellison enjoys throwing in to knock off any pretense of realism that the reader might have been coming in with.Because he discovers this right about the time that he sees the true nature of the Brotherhood's motives, this scene nicely accentuates his disgust for the inner workings of the organization. How graphic the descriptions of his gross empty eye socket are rounds off the feeling of disgust with a nice side-helping of nausea, just in case the readers weren't feeling quite as upset with the Brotherhood as the narrator was.

You're a crafty man, Ellison.

All right mister, is this really happy?

So I was pondering the ending of Invisible Man, and I can't help but notice how the narrator has ended up in quite the lose-lose situation here. He has achieved this total freedom of the opinions and judgments of others, but only because he never sees anyone else! Is being this "free" really worth the cost? So I guess the big question is whether or not we can read this as a happy ending.

When the narrator first descends into a hole, it was an unintentional result of an intense chase scene, but having fallen he sees that he was in a hole for his entire life. The narrator seems content with the situation, but is this really different from any other time in the book when he was happy and satisfied and we as readers were screaming at him to wake up and smell the coffee, or at least smell reality?

Irving Howe criticized this novel because he felt that the ending came far to suddenly: like "Oh I just fell this random manhole into the absolute darkness, which is just like my life, and I'm going to stay down here, because I don't really have a place in the world above, and I am going to 'find the light' with my light bulbs and paper torches, and it will be great." Well Mr. Howe, I happen to agree with you that the ending is sudden because it goes from intense chase to epilogue in 3.5 seconds, but I utterly disagree that this in any way takes away from the value of the novel. How you possibly expect anything else having read the rest of the book?  The entire thing has been a well-crafted jumble of events that do not seem to lead into one another on the surface, but do in fact convey a journey underneath. Each time the narrator exclaims that he has been enlightened and will no longer act as he has been, he gets one step closer to being the contemplative if slightly cynical figure in the warm hole. Even if he often still seems to resemble the naïve boy from the opening of the novel, his degree of naivety becomes continually less severe with each humiliating encounter he experiences.

So we return to the beginning question: is the end of this eye-opening journey actually a positive one for its sojourner? Nope not really. I think that the only way for this novel to end truly happily is for it to end unrealistically (yes the rest of the novel has avoided realism but not in the same sense—I mean a fairy-tale ending here). Let’s say that the narrator’s resurfacing was included in the ending, and he was received by everyone as being the lost hero and was finally allowed to control his own actions and was beloved and loved himself and everything was hunky-dory. This would be a happy (if sappy and sickening) ending, but he would still be subject to the opinions of everyone around him and incapable of truly being himself, as people would always only see what they want to see. So the happiest ending I can imagine, while impossible, is also not really happy from the narrator’s point of view.

Therefore, you see Mr. Howe, the only way to end this novel was the way that Ellison did: an ambiguous and ironic situation. He can either be free, or social; invisible, or trapped in a basement; alone, or misunderstood, and not one of these options will really lead him to happiness. I think the best we can hope for is for the narrator to be content with his singular existence. Even the promise of a resurfacing doesn’t seem like it can be all that positive if all he can do is start over with a bit more knowledge and a wider pair of eyes. Yikes.