SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 56
the amusement of a jeering white audience. The stakes are set high for the reader as they are
roped into the belief that he will get a chance to be seen through a humanistic lens through
his words.
Yet Ellison twists the story to reveal that the invitation was built on deception, leading
to probable death for others’ entertainment:
Everyone fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else.
No group fought together for long. Two, three, four, fought one, then turned to fight
each other, were themselves attached. Blows landed below the belt and in the kidney,
with the gloves open as well as closed, and with my eye partly opened, now there was
not so much terror. I moved carefully, avoiding blows, although not too many to attract
attention, fighting from group to group. The boys groped about like blind cautious
crabs crouching to protect their mid-sections, their heads pulled in short against their
shoulders, their arms stretched nervously before them, with their fists testing the smokefilled air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails.35
The main character’s recollection of the prize fight brings attention to the fear, exhaustion,
angst, and the vernacularity of routine subjection and deception that comes through a desire
to be incorporated into hopeful scenarios of US American life. In these moments of hope,
the main character’s humanity remains unseeable because of the animalistic likeness imposed
on him. The death, or the marred life state Ellison sets up, is where high suspense is seen in
the most traditional means. However, it is not a literal Life↔Death binary––but a death
of physical achievement, social transcendence beyond being read as an animal, and the
axiological potential of recognition. Alone, this scene meets the measure for categorizing
Ellison’s work as a GAN and great suspense by pushing for the accepted legibility of “the
white” in a rambunctious and original scene that provides a behind-the-curtain view in line
with what has been accounted for.
Ellison resisted the belief that blackness was incompatible with the American literary form
without breaking it. The challenge was two-fold. He must maintain the craft while bolstering
enough talent to relay “the white” of blackness, without flattening “the black” of blackness.
Unsurprisingly, Ellison’s opening scene resembles a great deal of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime
and Punishment, an imported American classic, in that the incalculable criminal takes a firstperson, anxiety-ridden recounting of turbulent tragedy and violent imposition on another,
whilst spotlighting their abode as an externalized representation of their mental state and
social position.
Ellison states:
From such writers [Dostoevsky, Tolstoy] you learn to explore the rich fictional
possibilities to be achieved in juxtaposing the peasant’s consciousness with that of
the aristocrat... This insight is useful when you are dealing with American society.36
Ellison modifies this Dostoyevskian trope by insinuating the character’s racial blackness,
thereby recasting internal fragmentation as a consequence of being rendered ontologically
illegible by being coded racially black. It is no coincidence that these formal parallels emerge
Ellison, Invisible Man.
Saul Bellow, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated, Modern Library Classics Ser
(Westminster: Random House Publishing Group, 2011), 785.
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