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PARTISAN REVIEW
was steeped in American history and culture across the lines of race,
class, and religion, and both he and Wright had been impressed by the
European grand masters of the novel forl11. But Wright was one who
chose to create his fireworks, both in fiction and nonfiction, through the
events themselves, assuming that the sheer lunacy that came into being
through institutionalized bigotry and the assumptions of entitlement as
well as the futility of overt resistance created a social surrealism. Ellison
took that surrealism into the arena of literary style, as but one of his
approaches, and made a book in which different states of being and con–
sciousness were reflected in the wa y the words themsel ves were orga–
nized for narrative. Wright depicted himself as a boy and as a young man
whose questioning often drew violent responses, which quite literally
made his life into one taken through the school of hard knocks. Ellison's
famously naive narrator, who is embittered and cynical when we meet
him, often finds himself in a violent situation because he follows the sur–
faces of words and the claims that he is being told the facts, not the
meanings that exist beneath them, which is also the underground
metaphor that drives the book. So the discovery of the differences
between what one is told and what one is experiencing give propulsion,
drama, disillusionment, and discovery to both books. Ellison has also
made some very famous literary moments from instances in
American
Hunger.
Both have a grandfather figure who fought in the Civil War and
is cheated at the hands of whites. There is a conflict in Wright between
the narrator and a high school principal who explains
to
him that he
must a lways tell whites what they want to hear and that Wright the boy
must allow the principal to write his speech or the school administrator
will doom his future educational chances. Wright refuses. He is finished
at school, will not return and will not be given a place on the faculty.
That school principal becomes the Southern Negro college president, Dr.
Bledsoe, in the section where Ellison's narrator is expelled for taking one
of the white trustees into the disruptive wilds of local Negro poverty, stu–
pidly giving the white man what he actually asks for instead of what he
wants, which is an idyllic picture of rural Negroes. When he goes north
to New York for the summer, Elli son's hero doesn't discover that he is
finished at the school until one of the white men to whom he has been
given a letter of introduction by Dr. Bledsoe lets him read it. Carrying
around a letter that attacks the carrier and shuts him off from any respect
the receiver might have for him seems to be a variation on the story that
Wright tells of se lling a newspaper he never read while a kid in Jackson,
Mississippi. It was published by white racists who depicted black men as
burdens and tastelessly dressed loafers lusting after white women. There
