1. Announcements! Also, any news from you?
2. Warm-up: Variations of Booker T. Washington (click HERE for the slides)
3. Socratic seminar: Chapters 11-14
HW: Please finish your proposal and turn it in tomorrow (typed preferred but not mandatory); start on your Invisible Man reading assignment for Friday (Chapters 15-18). We will have a prose-passage timed writing tomorrow. For Friday's reading ticket, find one passage that serves as a variation of an earlier scene and type the following:
- The original scene
- The variation
- A one-paragraph analysis of how the second scene is a variation of the first and Ellison's possible purpose in offering this variation. Feel free to ask questions, too.
Socratic Notes 11-14
ReplyDelete• Why was he suspended for 97 days?
• Did he regain his memory (pg.239), asking strange questions, is he being electrocuted? Possibly being revived?
• Negative effects, guinea pig that doctor had developed pg.236,”patient will live as he has to live…experience no major conflict…society will suffer no trauma on his account” –like Clockwork Orange, unable to do anything violent, change motives make him less of a person
• Machinery: treating narrator like a machine
• Rebirth, turning point, newborn baby as he has no memory and can’t talk, hears screaming in the background (mother I labor possibly), babied by the woman pg.244 – every chapter has a rebirth
• He exerts all his anger that now the rebirth, pg.237, “bewilderment suspended,” can’t be angry and he NEEDS to change
• Pg. 259 struggles with new identity, Dante’s Inferno, imagery of hell with “burning inside him,” hot vs. cold, fire vs. ice
• Pg.287 Rebirth – watching the doctors saying “What a hell of a time being born,” like the new Booker T. Washington
• Is he visible during the speech? Losing his identity by becoming Booker T. and becoming more visible and public
• Never specify his new name or his old name, got to the point where people could see him, now he’s invisible again
• What and how does he define home? Defines his home possibly as the general area of the south, idea of the yam is going back to his “roots,” growing plants, pg. 264 alluding to something else besides the yams, New York reference, black people are free with some sort of equality, underlying discrimination or racial tension, ever changing notion like Chicago or NY
• Black people in the north ignore the yams, racism for the blacks from the lacks, his own people discriminate because they have found their place
• Rejects the southern meal
• Star Wars Episode III – aren’t supposed to know what Vader is going to do, belongs and knows only what he has been taught by the emperor…the narrator doesn’t have decisions that he has made, bases it on something people tell him to do, southern blacks more intelligent than the northern blacks, fits into job stereotypes
• Also with yams, frostbite, accepting his past, not hiding and not being invisible, “slap” back to reality
• Pg. 309 white envelope – similar to Bledsoe, brotherhood seems like fraud, who is the brotherhood – narrator doesn’t know making us more confused, they seem almost like communists, Ellison himself was communist for some amount of time, term referring to Greek god of the underworld
• Reject the job because he was distrusting of the man, does he start to trust the people at the party or is he removed from the group, at the party - questions if he is a man or a natural resource, has his guard up, lady says he’s not “black enough”
• Birds popping out as he ran across the rooftops pg.204, he can escape… possible imagery from the girl, frantic white birds
• Longer you remain unknown, avoiding the system you stay safe form intervention, doesn’t trust them, he has an expiration date and is only useful when he’s not with police
• References to running, chasing something he won’t ever get to
• Booker T. Washington – grandfather’s advice, grandfather’s is more of trying to work towards something intentionally, grandfather’s is unintentional
• Mary is like Mary Magdalene from the Bible or like Sambo
• Pg. 311 – Brother Jack is a powerful man, refers back to the clown vs. fool
• Implications of “brotherhood”
• Gives narrator a new identity but doesn’t say what it is
• Resource instead of a person
• White Cream needs black person to work
• Founder is better than Booker T. because Jack knew who the Founder was
• Laughs at random times
• Fate that Washington has
• Why is the narrator not invisible, is that his downfall being invisible?
• Speech was confusing, ethnicity in the scene