Thursday, September 18, 2014
Narrator's Speech and the Brotherhood
The narrator’s entrance in the Brotherhood, while seen by the narrator as something that gives him freedom at this point, feels similar to the narrator being sent to college. He is recruited by Brother Jack to be part of the Brotherhood, but as soon as he joins, he is given a new identity and told where he is to live. It seems like his ability to define his identity for himself is taken away once again, as the narrator is once again told how he should act and the image he should strive to create in public. As he leaves Mary’s, he is carrying the remains of the bank that he smashed, because it reminded him of his old identity, but it kept being given back to him by people who claim to know who he is and what he is doing. It feels like the narrator cannot escape the identity no matter what he does. And while he wants to be as far away from Bledsoe as possible, taking a community leadership position by saying all the right things at the right time is very similar to what Bledsoe does; the narrator initially takes the job because he needs money.
The speech scene is a particularly interesting scene because it takes place in a boxing arena, which itself is reminiscent of the battle royal in the opening chapter, but also because of the imagery about blindness. The narrator notices a picture of a champion boxer who lost his sight in a fight. This could be foreshadowing, as the narrator thinks that he is championing the people and the cause, but in reality has become blinded once more. The suspicion and caution he displayed after the letter from Bledsoe has disappeared once more, and he trusts the Brotherhood blindly. Also, when he goes to give his speech he is blinded by the lights, which contributes to him forgetting the ideals of the Brotherhood and just going on instinct. Yet, while this speech successfully gets the attention of the crowd, some members of the Brotherhood are frustrated by his inflammatory style, and he is sent to learn the ideals of the Brotherhood and learn to give speeches in a more scientific manner. This is just another set of ideals that are impressed upon the narrator, hardly different from the college. While the narrator fails to see it, studying these ideals just blinds him once again as he starts to treat every situation by the ideals of the Brotherhood than by his own ideals and opinions.
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I wrote my most recent blog post on a related topic! It's definitely interesting how the narrator's recently discovered independence leads him to an organization where he is almost deprived of that freedom. And though it was the sentimentality that originally attracted Brother Jack to the narrator, it is also this trait that the Brotherhood forces him to purge, in exchange for a more "scientific" style and approach.
ReplyDeleteYou're right to point out all the ways that Ellison signals to the reader that the narrator's new "progress" might not be as significant as he'd like to believe--the conflation of boxing-ring and formal speech is probably the most striking of these, as it does immediately bring us back to the battle royal and the last time we saw the narrator eager to establish his new identity through a speech. Perhaps the most significant difference is that, this time, he is more wary and skeptical of those in authority--he accepts the critiques of the Brotherhood, to a point, but his response to having to be "trained" is impatient and irritated, not nearly so starry-eyed as he seemed about college at the end of chap. 1.
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