Summary and Analysis

Summary

The narrator wakes in a hospital to see a man—a doctor—with what appears to be a bright third eye glowing in the center of his forehead. The doctor asks him for his name, but the narrator can only think about his pain. The narrator cannot remember why he is in the hospital. He hears machines humming in the background and music that sounds like the cry of a woman in pain.

The first doctor declares that electric shock will have the effect of a lobotomy (a surgical procedure that involves severing nerve fibers in the brain to alleviate certain mental disorders) and adds that both the narrator and society will be better for this procedure. Someone suggests castration, but the doctor in charge chooses to continue with the electric shocks. The doctors ask the narrator a question, but he cannot understand the words. Asked his mother`s name, he can think only that a mother is “one who screams when you suffer,” and again he hears the screams of the hospital machines.

Analysis

This rebirth scene signals the transformation of the narrator’s character as he moves into a different phase of his life. The narrator’s relationship with the hospital doctors dramatizes the consequences of invisibility and blindness as they are portrayed throughout the novel. Because the narrator has temporarily lost the ability to speak, his doctors are unable to learn anything about his identity, and because he has amnesia, he himself knows very little about who he is. As the scene progresses and the white doctors continue to fail to ascertain any information about their black patient, they increasingly fall back on racial stereotypes, collapsing him into a caricature, a kind of dancing Sambo doll like the ones that Tod Clifton sells in Chapter 20.

As the narrator suffers the spasms of electric shock therapy, the doctors note caustically that black people have excellent rhythm. This electrical shock treatment recalls the electrified rug in Chapter 1, on which the narrator writhes and contorts to the amusement of white onlookers spouting racist beliefs. Similarly, in that episode, the narrator recalls seeing one of the other black boys “literally danc[ing] upon his back” and coming out of the spasm with an ashen face. In Chapter 9, when the narrator meets the jive-talking Peter Wheatstraw and recalls Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear (two characters from folktales introduced to America by African slaves), the encounter makes him smile “despite himself” as he feels a flash of mixed pride and disgust.

Now, however, the doctor’s inquiries about the folklore characters help the narrator to recover some of his memory. For while Southern black folklore constitutes a rich part of who he is, it also differentiates him from white people, and the racist doctors use this difference as an excuse to violate the narrator and deny his humanity. As evidenced in Chapter 1, the lurid interest of white men in black sexuality tends to revolve around the idea of black men lusting after white women, a stereotype that Ellison subtly references when he portrays the narrator watching the blonde woman nibble at the apple on the subway. The allusion to this stereotype foreshadows the narrator’s eventual sexual encounters with white women.