20th Century Novel (All Posts Above)

Invisible Man: puppet on a string

Throughout Invisible Man, Ellison hides many metaphors that relate to the narrators life. From the reoccurring theme of running to the coin bank at Marry's, but one particularly interesting one was the doll that pops up before the climax of the book. He stumbles upon Clifton (who he doesn't notice till later) advertising and selling racist puppet dolls. Like everyone else, the narrator finds himself sucked into the doll fascinated with how it moves, he doesn't even realize Clifton is the one selling the dolls nor does he get upset that they're racist dolls. The police eventually come and everyone runs away and the narrator grabs a doll off the ground later putting it into his brief case (another reoccurring metaphor). Upon picking it up he finally realizes how the doll was able to move, it had tiny black strings which Clifton were using to move it in such a way. This scene essentially creates a puppet on a string metaphor. In many ways, the Narrator is the puppet on t...

Sag Harbor

This is going to be one of my more informal blog posts as I prepare to graduate and reflect on my time at Uni. I want to connect a lesson I've learned to Benji's ideology of "the other boy," based off the prompt we received earlier this quarter. I think that Benji tries to separate himself so much from the younger version of himself because he's reminded of the time that him and his brother were neglected. I also think that some part of him might feel like a failure because he was trying so hard at the time to protect him and his brother from going shooting in the first place. But then his brother found a way around it and that'a how the whole mess started. All resulting in Benji getting hurt. This is an interesting aspect to explore but I really want to focus on why he tries so hard and yet fails to separate himself. I think the reason why Benji can't truly separate himself from the younger version of him is because he quite literally still has a part of...

The Sun Also Rises: Brett and Jake

The Sun Also Rises takes us on the journey of Brett’s adventures and life- particularly her love life. Perhaps out of all the men Brett has been with, Jake is the most notable, her relationship with him is different than those of the other men. The other’s seem to be mere hookups, other than her fiance which she doesn’t even seem to have that much of an emotional attachment to. From the first scene Brett and Jake are introduced together, we can clearly tell something is up. The taxi cab scene tells us a lot about both Jake and Brett as people but also their relationship to each other. For example, we are able to pick up on the fact that Brett is one of the only people that knows about Jake’s injury because of how they met in the war. Not only this but the scene unveils that Brett and Jake had a past that didn’t work out, and it seems as though it won’t work out in the future. The two of them want to be together but know it won’t work because it didn’t in the past....

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