Shortly before giving the speech that attracts the attention of the
Brotherhood, the narrator stops and buys three yams from a street vendor. In
this moment, we see the narrator briefly reconnect with his roots and realize
that he’s been kept running his entire life before he joins the Brotherhood and
has the veil lowered over his eyes once more.
When he sees the man selling yams, the narrator is overcome with
nostalgia. This is an unusual emotion for the narrator; normally, he seems to
be ashamed of his past and avoids talking or even thinking about it. Especially
in Harlem, we have repeatedly seen the narrator try and cast off his past self,
all connections to his former life, and move forward as a new person. For
example, when the narrator first arrives in the north, he describes in depth
how he plans to redo his wardrobe to create a new persona for himself. Later
when he is having breakfast in a diner, he refuses to order the special
consisting of foods he associates with the south, and instead chooses toast,
something plain and generic.
I also saw it as quite ironic that the moment where the narrator
realizes “I yam what I am” directly precedes his being recruited by the
Brotherhood where his identity is erased and sense of individuality is suppressed.
Immediately upon his acceptance into the Brotherhood, the narrator is given a new
name and persona, erasing the past he had just begun to connect to, and told that
there is no “I” and that no one’s individual beliefs or history are significant
in the bigger picture.
I also think that the narrator briefly realizes here that he has
been kept running for his entire life. He says, “What and how much had I lost
by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had
wished to do? . . . I had never formed a personal attitude towards so much. I had
accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple…” However,
though he has made this realization, he is still far from discovering invisibility.
Instead of trying to appear as though he still believes in the accepted attitudes
while secretly having his own opinions, he decides to just flat out believe and
do whatever he wants. We can see, even by the end of this scene, that this isn’t
going to work out for the narrator; “Yet the freedom to eat yams was far less than
I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth
now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been
frost-bitten”.
This is a really insightful post. The yam scene seems like just a small thing that happened, but like you say, it has a lot of significance in the story as a whole. It's interesting to contrast this scene with the earlier situation in the diner to see how his outlook on his heritage has changed. In the diner, he was ordered something he really didn't want to eat because he wanted to look cool and Northern. Now, he embraces his childhood and eats what he wants.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't considered the idea of the frostbitten yam suggesting that the narrator's current affirmation of his identity would be ephemeral. Before I had taken that part of the scene to mean that the city has corrupted the yams, which means it corrupts individuality, if that makes any sense. As with many other things in this novel, the meaning of this moment is ambiguous but it does seem like it serves to diminish the impact of the narrator's realization that he doesn't need to pretend to be anything that's not himself. It's interesting to note after seeing how being himself made the narrator ultimately unacceptable for the Brotherhood.
ReplyDeleteLike both comments above have stated, I had never thought about the yam scene in this light. Going from the University to the Brotherhood, with the blow up of individuality at the paint factory in between, the narrator thinks he has found himself while simply joining another broader idea. So many idealizations have been made of the narrator throughout his life that he is only recognizing in the yam scene that Harlem, not just the South, is not the place of self-actualization as he thought it would be.
ReplyDeleteIt is a great example of the "boomerang" structure that right after the narrator has this yam-epiphany, it's summarily deflated by his recruitment into the Brotherhood, which seems to set him back in terms of the personal advances reflected here. It's like, if only Jack didn't track him down, the novel could have ended right here! But there is a bridge--it's not that Ellison just has Jack walk in and burst the bubble. We can see the narrator's eviction speech as strongly influenced by this new feeling of identity and "roots," as he's moved to speak on behalf of the elderly couple precisely because they remind him of his grandparents, and he sees them as living embodiments of his own heritage and past. Their eviction into the cold northern winter might be seen as an analog to the frostbitten yam--these "roots" don't survive transit to the North. But the speech is both personal and impersonal, full of talk about who "we" are "as a people." It's not clear what impresses Jack about the speech (it's not clear that he even hears it; he just seems to see its effects), but it's definitely ironic that the first thing he wants to do upon enlisting the narrator in the Brotherhood is have him renounce his "roots" and cut off all ties to his family (including, symbolically, replacing the family name).
ReplyDelete