English Rowan TH

    Their Eyes Were Watching God  is absolutely full of detail. It has so much information about the places it discusses, and the cultures and people that they represent, which all ties back to Hurston's anthropological work. She is an expert in this exact kind of detail, and you can tell through her writing. She is specific and intentional in her presentation of people and the places that they live, as well as the things that happen there. In Chapter 18, Janie and Tea Cake experience an extremely strong and devastating hurricane. They ignore several signs that it could be damaging and end up having to go through the storm to get to safety when it eventually does get bad. It is a very intense incident, and the way that the storm is discussed is almost supernatural. The natural forces around Janie and Tea Cake are described as "cosmic," called "beast[s]" and "monster[s]." The lake and hurricane "roar" and "rag[e]."  One sentence desc

    In Chapter 23 of Invisible Man, the main character and narrator puts on a hat and a pair of sunglasses to disguise himself from Ras the Exhorter's men, who are trying to find him and beat him up. Throughout the chapter, he is mistaken for a man called Rinehart, who is apparently extremely well known all over Harlem for his roles as "Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend" (498). He puts on many different roles, but always wears the same costume, and so our narrator is mistaken for all of these different versions of the same man while wearing this disguise. During this time our narrator has the realization that he is an invisible man, and that if Rinehart can just walk around being all of these different people, he can pull off something similar. One of the threads that sort of ran through this chapter though but was never really openly discussed was the way that our narrator's ability to see other peop

    Invisible Man 's narrator goes through a lot of different associations and iterations in his search for identity and attempts to be finally seen. The most recent, and potentially longest-running so far, is his involvement with the Brotherhood, a vaguely communist activist organization he runs into in Harlem. His involvement with this group catapults him into a level of fame around Harlem that he really enjoys. He says, "My name spread like smoke in an airless room" and "On the way to work one late spring morning I counted fifty greetings from people I didn't know." (380) He suddenly is being recognized and praised for his work and he enjoys it. But still, even though he has this level of acclaim he feels that "there were two of [him]: the old self that slept a few hours a night and dreamed sometimes of my grandfather and Bledsoe and Brockway and Mary, the self that flew without wings and plunged from great heights; and the new public self that spoke

    In Invisible Man  Ralph Ellison is not trying to tell the story of just one man. However, taking on the project of representing everyone's experience with racism is a huge and probably impossible task. Because of how hard this would be, one of the tactics that Ellison heavily relies on throughout Invisible Man  is metaphor. These metaphors range from extremely on-the-nose to much more subtle, and they create a sort of almost ethereal, absurdist tone to the book as a whole. The things that the narrator goes through in this book are very extreme and often illogical or confusing. I would guess that all of this absurdity will shape the character into the manic person that he is in the prologue with his room with lightbulbs wired to every surface. I would argue that the choice to have the narrator set the tone this way at all is a strong commitment to absurdism from the get-go.      But more than just setting the tone, these metaphors also act as commentary on larger racial dynamics

     In "How Bigger Was Born" Richard Wright talks very explicitly about how he views Native Son 's Bigger Thomas as a composite of many people that he has known and observed over the course of his life. He discusses at length their various qualities and the ways that he thinks they all exemplify what he was trying to communicate through Bigger in Native Son.  For me, this supplement was definitely the most clarifying part of the book in reference to Bigger's character, and it was really interesting to read that after reading and discussing the book.       Reading Wright's description of who this character is and what his existence means is a very different experience from reading the book itself. Bigger means something much more expansive and far-reaching to Wright personally than just the character in this book. He is the culmination of many years of observation of the behavior of huge numbers of people, almost a theory of human nature in some ways. Wright says,