Summary and Analysis

Summary

The narrator leaves college on a bus to New York and meets Golden Day's veterinarian, who has been transferred to St. Elizabeth, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., and his new companion, Crenshaw. The veterinarian recalls his first trip up north to Chicago and speculates about the exciting new things the narrator will experience in New York, he also tells the narrator that he's been waiting so long to post to Washington, D.C. I will tell you. That's what I thought, but I wonder why it suddenly happened. As the bus stops at the next stop and goes their separate ways, he gives the narrator some last-minute advice on surviving in New York.

Arriving in New York, the narrator takes the subway to Harlem, where he is surprised to see so many black people. He is particularly surprised to see an angry black man with a West Indian accent calling out to a black group on the street without being arrested. After getting through the group, the narrator asks two white police officers for directions to the man's house, registers there, then quickly goes to his room and retrieves a packet of letters to begin planning his job search. .

Analysis

These three chapters mark a major change in the narrator's life as he leaves his beloved college behind and heads north to New York. Traveling from South to North (South Carolina to New York), the narrator tells the stories of millions who left the South during the Great Migration (1930-1945) in search of new lives in Northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit. Follow the journey of a black man. and New York. But unlike those characters who left the South with a sense of hope and promise, relieved to leave the arduous labors of plantation life behind, the narrator doesn't want to leave his beloved college. The only thing he has is the idea of ​​returning to campus once he earns enough money to continue his education, and gets Dr. Bledsoe's pardon.

The narrator's conversation with the veterinarian on the bus shows his continuing blindness to the events around him. As the veterinarian reminisces about his own adventures in Chicago and talks about all the exciting things the narrator has to look forward to, the narrator never stops asking the veterinarian why he has come back south. Washington, D.C., and his own "transfer" to New York. Instead, he worries that the veterinarian will turn violent and resents having to sit in the Jim Crow area of ​​the bus with him and Crenshaw.

Themes

Race and Racism

Identity and Invisibility

Power and Self-Interest

Dreams and the Unconscious

Ambition and Disillusionment