A Very Lit Blog

 Tod Clifton is an enigma of a character in Invisible Man, but it's hard to figure out why at first glance. You can tell there's something important about him, but you're not quite sure what. His entrance into the story feels like it's filled some sort of void (or perhaps I'm projecting my grief onto you), and his exit is bittersweet and leaves multiple characters angry and confused. Before we can answer the Tod Clifton question, we must talk about the narrator. Throughout the entire book, there is one specific thing that the narrator never really gets: a friend. He's had a temporary caregiver in Mary, but he was bothered by her preaching and looked down on her for having racist memorabilia in her house. He had a kind of paternal figure in Brother Tarp, who gave him a gift he didn't really know what to make of yet felt compelled to keep. But other than that, there isn't really anyone who's come close; and everyone who approaches him with friendliness...

     The narrator travels across plenty of ground in Invisible Man: from college to Liberty Paints to the streets of Harlem. He is one of thousands (at least) in each of those respective environments, and yet, every time something catastrophic happens, he is at the center of it. Now, from a reader's standpoint, this is a very good thing: so many incidents happening! Very fun!     But from a logical standpoint, this makes no sense. How is it possible that this guy is the catalyst for so many events? And these aren't just small accidents, either-- from the illness of a major investor to the literal explosion at the paint factory, everything that he kickstarts just happens to be an extremely damning occurrence. So why? Why is this dude the Leviathan all of a sudden?      Before we can properly answer that question, we need to look at some of the problems he's caused. First, the disastrous road trip with Mr. Norton: He comes to the college hoping...

     In the first part of Native Son, Bigger goes to see a movie with Jack called The Gay Woman . In it, a white woman cavorts behind her rich husband's back. She goes to a jazz club with her lover, and while they are there, a Communist runs in with a bomb. Her lover throws the bomb out of the window, and it turns out that he was trying to kill her husband but got the wrong guy. This makes her run back to her husband, and the movie ends.      This scene is small, more of a transition than anything else, but still, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, it's never explicitly stated that the woman's lover is black, however, with some context clues (the club and Bigger and Jack's response, most notably) and the overall themes of the book in mind, it's reasonable to assume that he is. So I'm going to go through the rest of this post with this assumption.     Firstly, in the movie, the lover is treated as a commodity for the woman, a pastime as op...

Coming of age, we aren't doing it anymore. This is an African American Literature blog now. bye bye

An oddly common motif throughout  Black Swan Green is that of birds: Jason lives in a town with "swan" in it, and he also attends a goose fair, during which he makes a crucial decision regarding his own principles (choosing to return the wallet to notorious asshole Ross Wilcox). Now, that's not a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice. We can do something with this.      "Black Swan Green hasn't got any swans." This sentence is one of the first things we hear about the town from Jason. It's a quick little quip, something that could be easily passed off as world building. And yet, at the end of the book, when Jason is contemplating the many changes his life has gone through in such a short time, what does he see? A swan.  Swans are very common symbols in literature, and mean many different things, but one I'm choosing to focus on one specific meaning: that of elegance and femininity. Jason is embarrassed about his poetry; the hypermascul...

 Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel uses herself and her father as allegories relating to other literary works many, many times, even to the point of redundancy. While this might just be her love of literature, something she shared with her father, I would argue that it is more to frame her narrative less like an autobiography, but more like a crafted fictional tragedy. Many times in the book, Bechdel mentions how novelesque her life was, even apologizing for some of the dramatic irony present in her story. I will just come out and say that I'm pretty sure a good chunk of her story is embellished for effect, and there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But I think her use of her and her family as a tool for storytelling is something she picked up not only from her extremely influential father, but her mother as well. In the first few chapters, Bechdel states that her father seemed to occasionally enjoy having kids, as it helped "add to the illusion", like they were mu...

     Throughout the book, Salinger gives us multiple hints that Caulfield is not a character to look up to. The way he interacts with authority figures he feels do not deserve his respect is ignorant at best. Likewise, Holden displays varying self-destructive tendencies both before and after he leaves the prep school: purposefully goading his hot-tempered roommate into laying him out, attempting to solicitate alcohol from multiple sources, getting himself beat up again, etcetera. From reading between the lines and properly acknowledging that these actions are supposed to reflect badly on both Holden and his mental state, we (this English class, at least) can properly understand that Catcher in the Rye is a study of a deeply flawed man who has serious issues that need to be worked out by a professional.     This character is not particularly unique nowadays, but when some of them bleed into popular culture they can have quite an effect on people. Before I say wha...