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Baby Suggs and Paul D

  While I was reading the assignment from 12/3 (pages 159-195), something that stood out to me was the parallelism of Baby Suggs and Paul D. Throughout the novel I thought of them as two separate, very different people, despite both living at Sweet Home. In the novel, Baby Suggs is a voice and person of the past that occasionally motivates or encourages characters in the present. Paul D is a character that exists in the present and does not appear to have any capabilities of “seeing” anything outside of the ordinary. In this chapter, though, there is a joining of the past (Baby Suggs)  and the present (Paul D) in the middle of the novel: as Baby Suggs experiences the event at 124 and Paul D hears of the true story of the event at 124 for the first time.  The beginning of Baby Suggs’ interaction with 124 begins with her talking with Janey about her need for a job. Janey suggests the slaughterhouse. Almost immediately, Baby Suggs’ is drawn to the slaughterhouse, “When they asked what wor
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Tea Cake is Not Fine

Tea Cake is a very questionable character to me. While I have not finished the book completely, I still do not like him and do not think my opinion will change by the end of the novel. In my opinion, I think Tea Cake is hiding ulterior motives behind his suave facade. Tea Cake has quite a bit of reasonable characteristics to pursue a relationship with Janie, in a socio-economic sense: he is twelve years younger than her, dirt poor, and is an incredibly hard worker. Earlier in the novel, the reader is told of Janie’s experience under the pear tree and her perception of love as a result of it. I do believe that in her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie is achieving her goals of the bee and the flower by the pear tree. Janie has achieved a relationship that is co-dependent in the more traditional way that she would like. Despite not working in the field with Logan, she goes out in the field to work with Tea Cake, showing how passionately she loves him. Marriage is not a feeling of loneli
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Chapter 24

     As a reader, I found Chapter 24 particularly disturbing, not only because of its content but by the message that the reader takes away from it. I feel that in this chapter, Ellison only perpetuates two horribly incorrect beliefs. The first, being that black men are violent beings with innate carnal desires to not only objectify and abuse but rape women, specifically white women. The second, being that women not only enjoy but quite literally ask for rape.      Similar to his interaction with the woman from The Woman Question, the narrator is desired by Sybil in an animalistic sense. She says to him on page 520, "Look at me like that; just like you want to tear me apart." Throughout he rest of the chapter, Sybil continues to objectify the narrator, calling him "boo'ful" and a "big black bruiser" (522-523). Sybil has a fetishized fantasy of her relations with the narrator because of his race. The narrator feeds into her desire telling her, "You
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You Want to Be a Complex Woman in a Novel Written by a Man? Think Again!

  Throughout Invisible Man , the narrator crosses paths with many women. However, the overt dilemma is the depiction of all of these women. Ellison and the narrator both typecast both black and white women in the book into strict molds that they are to follow. While one may argue that Ellison's depiction of these women is merely because they are nonessential to the overall progression of the plot, this belief is not held to the men in the book that are present for only a few pages. Men who pass the narrator in a fleeting moment are given more depth, are displayed to have greater intelligence, and have a greater range of personalities and abilities than their female counterparts.  The white women in Invisible Man exist as only sexual objects of interest to the author and other characters in the novel. An example of this is in the first chapter of the novel, when the narrator is at the battle royal. As the students are ushered into the room where the fight will occur, they notice
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The Dark History of White Medicine

          As I was reading about the lobotomy (pseudo or not) performed on the narrator in Chapter 11, I was reminded of the brutal history and relation between white doctors and black people, specifically female slaves. The chapter begins with the narrator being forced to swallow an unknown medicine. After losing consciousness, he wakes to white doctors and nurses surrounding him as he undergoes a series of electrical shocks. As the shocks are being administered, one of the doctors argues that these primitive methods would not be used on someone that, “were a New Englander with a Harvard background?” (236). They are rebutted by another doctor that claims the narrator will, “experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account” (236). Another doctor adds, “Why not castration, doctor?” (236).  The doctors continue to call the narrator “boy” and laugh at his suffering, exclaiming, “They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot
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Bigger Thomas' Impact on the Reader

   Bigger Thomas is arguably one of the most controversial characters in literary history, and rightfully so.      The way that Richard Wright writes Bigger Thomas contradicts the depiction of protagonists in most novels I have read. Typically as a reader, your feelings towards the protagonist may slightly change as the book and character progress, but ultimately, your opinion of the protagonists of the novel usually improves or stays at the same level as when you started the book. However, in this novel, my opinions of Bigger fluctuated throughout the entire novel on a frequent basis. At times I was upset with Bigger, felt disgust and disdain towards him, and was overall disappointed in him. Other times, I pitied him, rooted for him, and felt some sense of relatability with him.      In the beginning of the novel and our discussions of it, I honestly didn’t think that Bigger was that unlikeable of a character. Every action, thought, and feeling of Bigger in Book One: Fear was either
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