The Ideology of the Narrator

As we’ve been watching the narrator progress throughout the story, he has had several major changes in ideology. From his naïve and submissive beginnings, to the very aware and active person he has started to become, he has gone through an intense series of transformations in how he thinks and acts. Now we have mostly been focused on his individual beliefs and haven’t really been assigning them to any type of category. Looking back on it now, many of his beliefs fit into specific categories that were very prevalent at the time and could be another commentary by Ellison on the state of the world. 

Now some of these ideologies are more obvious than others, but they’re still there. Starting off the book we get one of the more hidden forms of the ideologies, though it is possible to see the correlation between the ideas. The narrator starts off in his college with the figure of Bledsoe constantly looming over everything. Bledsoe controls everything, and nobody seems to have a say in what he does. He basically rules the college and the surrounding area with an iron fist and keeps a very tight control over everything related to money that flows through the college. Now if we were to look at the college as if it were a nation, with Bledsoe the leader, it would seem very similar to a fascist dictatorship. Bledsoe controls everything, there is basically a cult of personality surrounding him, and anyone who opposes him or messes things up seems to just disappear like the narrator or the vet. The further and further one looks into the similarities between the two general systems of ideas, the more similarities that become apparent. 

Fast-forward some to when the narrator joins the Brotherhood. Now as we’ve talked about in class, the Brotherhood is a clear metaphor for communism. All of their ideas line up, as does their work with unions and talk of calling everyone “brother”. Even the part where everything seems to be equal even when there is actually a dictator is shown. Brother Jack basically being in control of everything, much as Stalin or Mao were. They both have the same basic problems regarding inefficiency and disregard for the power of the individual. It’s a very clear connection that is almost taken for granted at this point. 

The final ideology that has only just started to come into play, but that we’ve seen in the prologue, is anarchism. The narrator talks about undermining the Brotherhood, and generally being free to do whatever he wants. In the prologue we see him waging a one-way war against the electrical company, which aligns with the general ideas of anarchy with regards to corporations. We even see him living alone in a place where he doesn’t pay any rent or taxes and seems to be able to do anything without organized opposition. It will be interesting to see if further correlations between the narrator’s actions and the ideas of anarchism come into play as the book continues, but as we have only just transferred over into this phase of the narrator, it is hard to draw as many parallels.

Bringing it back the point in the beginning, could Ellison be trying to say something about the world with these allegories? This book was written in the early 50s, a time when many of these different ideas were on the rise or had recently been popular. I think that Ellison could be using the narrator to express how many countries at the time had been switching ideologies every few years, going from Democratic to Fascist to Communist in the blink of an eye. Let me know what you think might be happening with these parallels, or if you think they are just weird coincidences.