Why his FRICKIN' shoes black and white?


     Ellison, man. You’ve got to let it go. We get it, black and white symbolize things and a lot of things can be colored black and white and be symbolic but, my gosh, not eVERYTHING has to be. Okay. Up until page 492, whenever I came across another black or white object it was still pretty funny, and I wagged my finger knowingly and thought that Ellison sure is something, there’s that symbolism again rubbed in my face in such a clever way har har har. But then I hit page 492 and somehow the subject turns to the narrator’s shoes AGAIN, and I was just like….why you forcin’ it Elli. I mean, we have this interesting Rinehart character come into action and then, of all things, we have to talk about his shoes? Who’s known for his shoes anyways (knobtoed, which by the way are basically just like any other classy black shoe ever), when he has such iconic other articles of fashion like his sunglasses and hat? Who would even be looking at his shoes? That creepy. Ellison please stop making everything black and white. It’s a grey world! We grey people! Come to think of it, Invisible Man is starting to feel like an oversimplification. Yes, race is a big thing and the white-black contrast has endless opportunities to bring light to stereotypes and everything, but is it just me or does the narrator not really have a personality. He’s like a smooth-talking social ladder climbing robot who has exactly one emotional setting: hangry. Correct me if I’m wrong, but humans are wahay more complicated than this narrator person is—like, we have weaknesses. Sure he slept with a woman but he turned the incident into like a weird political analogy in his head instead of doing a normal human thing like brag about getting some. He saw his “best friend” get shot dead (honestly though I don’t know how Clifton was his best friend, as far as I read, they didn’t really have much meaningful hang time) but again he turned it into some political thing like the robot person he is. He gets angry sometimes in a really weird way, where his mind starts whirling and reality gets all distorted for him, and I always get the feeling like he’s about to pass out. Maybe he is just really hangry all the time and because of that he doesn’t have the physical resources to experience emotion. He shouldn’t have skipped out on those pancakes. Next time, opt for more than just toast and black coffee. Cabbage soup is not your enemy. Get urself some yams, dawg. Oh wait. Reread my last nine sentences. Who does that remind you of? BIGGER THOMAS. BOOM. Same cold indifference in the pursuit of survival, whether it be literal survival or political. Same driving force behind every single action, only instead of fear, it’s hanger. Never mind. Ellison is a genius. But really, he can back off a little with the white and black metaphors.

     I apologize, I wrote the prior paragraph in a very ranting mood and now as I reread it the next day I realize I’m pretty annoying. I get it, the book is about black and white relationships and not about the intricacies of the human mind. It’s on an ideological level like Native Son. I really do like Ellison’s writing, it’s very complex and clever. I like the symbolism. Some points I made still stand though.

Comments

  1. RoshanOctober 14, 2019 at 11:52 AM

    I kind of disagree but also kind of agree. There's a lot of symbolism and it's tiring to me only because I do not want to have to unpack every single sentence but I feel like Ellison wants me to. I also think you should consider that the narrator sees everything as black and white as an intentional decision made by Ellison. I actually think he has many weaknesses and most of them have to do with his naivety. Also he responds with politics when Clifton dies but that quickly gets stripped away into real Human emotions during his speech. Anyway I guess I'm trying to say that the narrator is pretty complex, definitely more complex than Bigger. Also, maybe things were more black and white in the time period. Consider what would be different in the mid twentieth century, and how polarizing it was.

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  2. Anya Kaplan-HartnettOctober 17, 2019 at 9:07 AM

    Personally, I think that Ellison's symbolism is what makes this novel so good. The world appears black and white to the narrator because that's how American racism works in the novel. How can a racist system see people as grey? What do you mean by grey? Additionally, there's no way to think about Clifton without acknowledging that he was murdered in cold blood by a white policeman. I don't think it makes the narrator a robot to want social change.

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  3. MitchellOctober 21, 2019 at 10:19 AM

    I wrote a post on this same topic--"Am I Reading Too Much into This?"--about the time I noticed the random snake slithering into the woods as the narrator leaves his "edenic" paradise of college behind for New York. And I could have written it again after I noticed, this time around, the allusions to _The Odyssey_ in the scene where Jack becomes a cyclops and the narrator decides he has to trick Jack, exploiting his blindness, in order to escape from the Brotherhood. Are we imagining or projecting these things? Is *every* mention of black and white "significant"? Or--and this is a *very real* possibility in this novel--is Ellison occasionally just messing with us, dropping in symbolic elements throughout so we know that everything in the novel "signifies," but we're not able to put together a single coherent "meaning" from all this excessive signification? Sometimes I'm absolutely sure that the symbolism is really significant (the white blindfolds in the Battle Royal, for example); other times, I'm less confident.

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