The migrant stranger character role is a key component to the migration narrative and is most often a secondary character, foil, or opposing force that a protagonist meets in his or her journey to a new place. But in many migration narratives, most notably Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and as I argue, the works of Zora Neale Hurston, the migrant stranger functions more as the protagonist and not just as someone with whom the protagonist crosses paths; moreover, this is a character who attempts to remain in or a part of his or her community, even if s/he is unable to do so. German philosopher Georg Simmel’s concept of “The Stranger” definitely applies to my reading of Hurston’s characters, as he contends that the stranger is a person …show more content…
This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations. The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself. …show more content…
The numbers presented earlier in this chapter illustrate how and why large groups of people sought home in a Northern urban environment, and the literary examples provided depict the forces that caused migration, what was encountered by these migrants, and what might lie ahead for them. Authors before Hurston carefully measured the movement of characters in and about the South. Early authors of the migration narrative, such as W.E.B. DuBois inThe Souls of Black Folk, Paul Laurence Dunbar in The Sport of the Gods, and Jean Toomer in Cane, all experimented with a return to the South, but, as Griffin puts it, “the South remained the site of racial horror and shame for black writers” (146). Authors from more recent time periods have experimented with various destinations for their protagonists, including Ellison and Wright, who both experimented with Europe as a possible destination for their strangers. Furthermore, Ellison’s Invisible Man retreats to the underground (for a multitude of reasons) as escape from the conflicts he faces along his literal and figurative journey. Regardless, Hurston’s treatment of her characters eventually led to a rethinking of the migration narrative. As Griffin notes, “the decades of the seventies and eighties found black
The work, the Souls of Black Folk explains the problem of color-line in the twentieth century. Examining the time following the civil war the author, W.E.B. Dubois, explains the African American experience of living behind the “veil”. To fully explain the experience of living behind the veil, he provides the reader with situations that a black race experiences in reconstruction. This allowed the readers to metaphorically step into the veil with him. He accomplishes this with the use of “songs of sorrow” with were at the beginning of each chapter, and with the use of anecdotes.
The transition of being a black man in a time just after slavery was a hard one. A black man had to prove himself at the same time had to come to terms with the fact that he would never amount to much in a white dominated country. Some young black men did actually make it but it was a long and bitter road. Most young men fell into the same trappings as the narrator’s brother. Times were hard and most young boys growing up in Harlem were swept off their feet by the onslaught of change. For American blacks in the middle of the twentieth century, racism is another of the dark forces of destruction and meaninglessness which must be endured. Beauty, joy, triumph, security, suffering, and sorrow are all creations of community, especially of family and family-like groups. They are temporary havens from the world''s trouble, and they are also the meanings of human life.
Hines, Ellen, and Hines, William, and Stanley, Harrold. The African American Odyssey. Fifth Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2008. Print.
Born on a plantation in Mississippi, Richard Wright grew up in an environment stricken in poverty. When Richard was five years old his father deserted the family. Richard's mother, a school teacher, did her best to support the family but her income was not enough therefor Richard was often sent to an orphan asylum for various intervals of time. Just before Richard's tenth birthday his mother became paralyzed and moved in with relatives in Mississippi. At fifteen he began working in Memphis as a porter and messenger. It was around this age that Richard became thoroughly interested in reading and writing. Due to rules and regulations on segregation, Richard was unable to get some books that could only be found in the library for white people. F...
Walker and Marshall write about an identity that they have found with African-American women of the past. They both refer to great writers such as Zora Neale Hurston or Phillis Wheatley. But more importantly, they connect themselves to their ancestors. The see that their writings can be identified with what the unknown African-American women of the past longed to say but they did not have the freedom to do so. They both admire many literary greats such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen, but they appreciate these authors' works more than they can identify with them.
James, Johson Weldon. Comp. Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 832. Print.
During 1910 and 1970, over six million blacks departed the oppression of the South and relocated to western and northern cities in the United States, an event identified as the Great Migration. The Warmth of Other Suns is a powerful non-fiction book that illustrates this movement and introduces the world to one of the most prominent events in African American history. Wilkerson conveys a sense of authenticity as she not only articulates the accounts of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, but also intertwines the tales of some 1,200 travelers who made a single decision that would later change the world. Wilkerson utilizes a variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology, and economics in order to document and praise the separate struggles but shared courage of three individuals and their families during the Great Migration.
African American literature as a genre, of which the classification and nomenclature is a topic for another debate, is associated with slavery, suffering, poverty, sexual assault, etc. Both Percival Everett’s protagonist and Percival Everett himself struggled to have their works, which were topically outside slavery and mass suffering, published. One can gather how this exemplifies the Black movements’ reasoning behind the push towards a redefined genre. The success of tales of tragic suffering such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or Push by Sapphire, to name a few, contributed to pin holing the genre.
Sula proves to fit this hole missing in the literature world. A community that seems to have all the cards stacked against them. Being black during this era, 1915-1965, means fighting for survival. It means scrimping to get by, doing menial jobs, doing all they can to get by.
Alienation, the state of being isolated from a group or category that one should be apart of, exists in three forms; man’s alienation from man, man’s alienation from fellow men, and man’s alienation from the world itself. These three classes of alienation are fluid phases of the same process that exists to some extent within every member of society. The intriguing and complex nature of alienation has sparked the interest of many philosophers, artists, and authors around the world, resulting in works of art and literature that attempt to give insight into living life alone. Authors Herman Melville and Frank Kafka both reveal the struggles of functioning set apart from society through the protagonists in their respective short stories; Bartleby the Scrivener, and The Hunger Artist. The overall theme of marginalization in society in both Bartleby the Scrivener and The Hunger
Ralph Ellison manages to develop a strong philosophy through characterization of the Invisible Man. Ellison portrays the lonely. narrator's quest in struggling to find his identity and an understanding of his time with us. The development of the character lays out the foundation of the philosophy of finding and understanding. Through a labyrinth of corruption and deceit the narrator undergoes events.
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Dubois is a influential work in African American literature and is an American classic. In this book Dubois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In addition to these lasting concepts, Souls offers an evaluation of the progress of the races and the possibilities for future progress as the nation entered the twentieth century.
The main character is completely alienated from the world around him. He is a black man living in a white world, a man who was born in the South but is now living in the North, and his only form of companionship is his dying wife, Laura, whom he is desperate to save. He is unable to work since he has no birth certificate—no official identity. Without a job he is unable to make his mark in the world, and if his wife dies, not only would he lose his lover but also any evidence that he ever existed. As the story progresses he loses his own awareness of his identity—“somehow he had forgotten his own name.” The author emphasizes the main character’s mistreatment in life by white society during a vivid recollection of an event in his childhood when he was chased by a train filled with “white people laughing as he ran screaming,” a hallucination which was triggered by his exploration of the “old scars” on his body. This connection between alienation and oppression highlight Ellison’s central idea.
In this paper I will discuss Richard Wright’s novel which was divided into three books, fear, flight, and fate. This novel was written about a young black named Bigger Thomas who lived in Chicago in the 1930’s. Bigger struggles with realizing limited opportunities and resisting, hating, and fearing. Bigger Thomas felt forced into a corner by discrimination as he felt frustrated by racism. Bigger later felt as if he had the power over the Caucasian population once he murdered a white woman and a white man. The murders that Bigger committed finally gave Bigger his meaning of life while he sat in jail but unfortunately it was too late and his crimes resulting in a trial and execution.
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.