Summary and Analysis

Summary

In the beginning, the narrator was visiting the chapel, and he hears a blind Chicago pastor, the Reverend Homer A. Barbie, deliver a powerful sermon about the founder and his vision for the university. Overcome with emotion, the narrator leaves early to prepare for a meeting with the doctor. He prepares the bread saw. During the meeting, he was shocked to discover that Bledsoe, who was entrusted with carrying on the founder's legacy, had nothing to do with the man Reverend. Barbie set it up for that. That night, after Bledsoe reveals to the narrator his greedy, selfish, and opportunistic personality and lectures him on the politics of race and power, Bledsoe banishes the narrator. The devastated narrator decides to leave immediately and returns to Bledsoe's office to receive seven letters promising Bledsoe to help him find a job in New York and to spend the fall and return to school. You can earn enough money. Grateful for his help, the narrator takes the letter and puts it in a briefcase along with his high school diploma.

Analysis

These chapters display that, in preference to retaining and shielding the Founder`s legacy, Dr. Bledsoe perpetuates the parable of white supremacy by instructing his college students to live of their place, subservient to whites. Thus, because the narrator suspects as he ponders the statue of the Founder lifting the veil, Bledsoe is, in truth, decreasing the veil and making sure that his college students remain "withinside the dark."

Although they appear very different, Rev. Barbee and Dr. Bledsoe are comparable in a few approaches. (See Character Analyses.) The maximum hanging resemblance between the 2 guys is that each is unaware of the reality and therefore "withinside the dark" approximately the approaches of the global. But whilst Rev. Barbee is bodily blind and can't see matters as they are, Dr. Bledsoe is emotionally blind and genuinely refuses to look, that's a long way extra debilitating.

Here again, Ellison skillfully merges truth and fiction. Bledsoe and Barbee allude to the 2 facets of a famed ancient figure: Booker T. Washington, the Founder of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. Praised by a few as an effective chief and educator, Washington turned into condemned by others — along with the well-known black pupil and educator W.E.B. Du Bois — for his conciliatory stance on "social equality." Although his intentions have been good, Washington turned into unaware of the effect his conciliatory stance had on blacks who have been decided to combat for identical rights at any cost.

Bledsoe reveals, via his sermon, that he as soon idolized the Founder withinside an equal manner the narrator idolizes Bledsoe (till he discovers his real character). While Bledsoe (just like the narrator) despises lower-elegance blacks, he can't deny the racial and cultural ties that bind him to "those human beings." Like Trueblood, Bledsoe is a blues singer and storyteller. But in contrast to Trueblood — who stays real to his blood (human beings) — Bledsoe betrays his human beings. Rev. Barbee's sermon infers that Dr. Bledsoe turned into as soon as an idealistic younger guy just like the narrator who really believed withinside the Founder's dream. But — as is discovered via Bledsoe's resulting communication with the narrator — Bledsoe's painful reports as a black guy in a racist white society so distorted his imagination and prescient that he can not see the dream.

During his fateful assembly with Bledsoe, the narrator learns a few precious classes regarding the politics of race and electricity. Bledsoe's rhetorical query, "What type of schooling are you getting round here?" appears to confuse the narrator as he struggles to inform his aspect of the tale regarding Norton's disastrous campus tour. In mild of Rev. Barbee's effective sermon regarding the Founder's dream of bringing black human beings out of the darkness and lack of knowledge of slavery into the mild of information via schooling, Bledsoe's query appears especially poignant, because it highlights the comparison among "the manner matters are and the manner they may be alleged to be."

Still haunted by the horrors of slavery, which legally denied blacks the proper to examine and write, blacks noticed schooling as a way of acquiring a degree of delight and dignity and a possibility for a higher life. Along with guys along with Booker T. Washington, the founding father of Tuskegee Institute — which serves because the version for Ellison's anonymous Southern university — blacks believed that schooling could offer a manner out of the crushing cycle of poverty skilled through sharecroppers and tenant farmers, further to driving whites to look them as intelligent, articulate people in preference to brutes ideally fitted for running withinside the fields and appearing different kinds of hard, menial labor. Moreover, coaching human beings to emerge as independent, essential thinkers and transmitting the lifestyle and records of human beings are of schooling's number one goals. Neither goal, however, performs an element in Bledsoe's philosophy of schooling.

Key snapshots in those chapters consist of the surreal photo of Rev. Barbee's collar reducing off his head, symbolizing the separation of thoughts and frame (due to the fact blacks have been now no longer allowed to combine their thoughts and frame and emerge as complete guys), and the statue of the Founder dirty through the mockingbird, symbolizing the white stain on black records.

The position of faith, the electricity of sermonic language with its drama, biblical imagery, and emphatic repetition, and the effect of the black church on the black community, also are significant. Although Ellison specializes in the significance of the church, via Rev. Barbee's blindness he additionally desires to factor out that blind religion without a grounding in truth is of little use to the black community. Returning to the snapshots of the blindfolds and the veil, Ellison is alluding to the truth that faith turned into regularly used to hold blacks "of their place," as white preachers regularly preached sermons centering at the theme, "Slaves, be obedient to them which might be your masters." He is likewise looking to factor out that surviving on this global necessitates each a nonsecular imaginative and prescient in addition to a corporation hold close on truth.

Bledsoe, gambling the position of the university gatekeeper, jealously guards his position. Afraid that a person just like the narrator — whom he sees as a capability threat — will undermine his authority and mission the repute quo, Bledsoe receives rid of him immediately.

Themes

Race and Racism

Identity and Invisibility

Power and Self-Interest

Dreams and the Unconscious

Ambition and Disillusionment