Miss Baker is compared to a “young cadet,” and further description of her androgynous features characterizes her as a “flapper.” This makes her representative of the novel’s emphasis on modern styles that clash with established, traditional standards, including gender roles.
The Great Gatsby – 1
The Great Gatsby – 2
Tom Buchanan is supposedly reading a book called “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” which is a reference to the real-life book The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard was a white supremacist and Buchanan’s association with his ideas–in particular, the notion that northern Europeans have contributed everything that makes civilization worthwhile and must guard their dominant position vigilantly–is likely to make Tom unpopular with readers.
The Great Gatsby – 3
Fitzgerald makes reference to the Fourth of July in the same sentence in which a “gray, scrawny Italian child” is described. Tom comments that the neighborhood is “terrible” immediately after the reference to the child. Maybe this kid represents the classes of people he feels like civilization, and the country, needs to be guarded against.
The Great Gatsby – 4
Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, is described in a manner that contrasts with the descriptions of Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan. She’s “faintly stout” and carries her “surplus flesh sensuously.” She’s also described as having “rather wide hips.” She is not a flapper, so she might be symbolic of something more traditional.
The Great Gatsby – 5
Gatsby stands absorbed in his observation of the point where the green light appears at Daisy’s house, even though Daisy is standing at his side. He’s focused on the light that symbolizes her, as he has been for so long, instead of interacting with her while she’s actually present. The green light is losing significance for him now that he and Daisy are interacting, and Fitzgerald writes “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
The Great Gatsby – 6
Nick concludes that there must be moments during Daisy’s interaction with Gatsby when she falls short of the dream of her that Gatsby’s created, the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” If Daisy is Gatsby’s dream, in a novel about the American Dream, what do her shortcomings say about how that Dream can be unfulfilling?
The Great Gatsby – 7
Fitzgerald describes the “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” James Gatz re-creates himself for when assumes the name Jay Gatsby. This concise description is a bleak summary of the American Dream.
The Great Gatsby – 8
When Tom confronts Gatsby about his affair with Daisy, he makes hypocritical reference to “family life and family institutions,” even though he’s guilty of infidelity himself. This reference to traditional institutions symbolizes the challenge to tradition that is at the heart of this modernist novel. Gatsby’s modern dream is to be the upstart who topples tradition and wins the girl of his dreams, despite the fact that he’s not from an old, established family. Furthermore, Tom compares the affair between Gatsby and Daisy to the idea of interracial marriage, another prospect that represents a challenge to tradition and, in Buchanan’s mind, civilization.
The Great Gatsby – 9
As they recover her mangled body, Myrtle Wilson is described as having “tremendous vitality.” This description contrasts with that of the other women, the lithe, androgynous, modern flappers. What does it mean that the woman with the traditional appearance is killed, albeit accidentally, by the modern woman?
The Great Gatsby – 10
Nick notes that Gatsby’s guests guessed at his “corruption” while he waved at them, “concealing his incorruptible dream,” his intensely personal version of the American Dream, his yearning for Daisy.
The Great Gatsby – 11
Nick describes Gatsby as having “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” This sounds a lot like the “grotesques” from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, men and women who are disfigured by their fixation on things they aren’t able to obtain or accomplish. Fitzgerald uses the word “grotesque” in the same paragraph.
The Great Gatsby – 12
Nick notes that the story’s main characters are from the West and asserts “perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
The Sun Also Rises – 1
In the first scene in which Brett Ashley appears, she enters a bar with a group of gay men. She is described as “lovely,” but Jake is angry, and he even says he is inclined “to swing on one, any one” of the men.
The Sun Also Rises – 2
Shortly after the scene in which Brett Ashley appears with the gay men, she is described as attractive, even though her clothes and hair are boyish. Jake notes, “her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that.” These aspects of her personal fashion associate Brett with androgyny.
The Sun Also Rises – 3
The unspecified injury that stops Jake and Brett from being in relationship–to which Jake refers with the words “Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it”–has presumably resulted in his impotence. This impotence could be regarded figuratively. Jake and Brett, who symbolize modern culture, are incapable of generating anything new.
The Wasteland – 1
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
These lines from “The Wasteland” refer not only to death and decay, but also, to an inability to generate new things. This is a theme that’s echoed in other works associated with Modernism.
The Sun Also Rises – 4
A black character who is described, in passing, as “the nigger drummer” says “Hahre you” for “How are you?” and “Thaats good.” This deliberate effort on Hemingway’s part to depict the character’s mangling of English is an example of the mnemonic minstrel mask described by Houston Baker (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance). In other words, even though it’s possible to extract meaning from the way the character’s speech is written, black language is sometimes depicted as mnemonic, nonsense that only has meaning as a representation of the people to which it refers; meaninglessness that represents “blackness.”
The Sun Also Rises – 5
Jake and Bill wait for quite a while for a seat at a restaurant that’s become popular with Americans. As they leave, Jake says “Too many compatriots,” immediately prior to his observation that a neighborhood is being razed to accommodate those “compatriots,” American tourists and expatriates. Jake and others like him are disrupting life in the old world, spurring progress that’s destroying the past.
The Sun Also Rises – 6
Jake sees a cathedral he describes with the words “The first time I ever saw it I thought the facade was ugly, but I liked it now. I went inside.” Does this new interest in the church represent a nostalgic desire for former meaning-making institutions, for the authority and grandeur of old establishments that have become less accessible, with the dawn of modernism? Whether it does or not, Jake has trouble praying once he enters it.
Native Son – 1
Early on in Native Son, Bigger watches a pigeon “strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat neck bobbing with regal pride.” After watching the bird, Bigger says to his friend Gus, “Now, if only I could do that.” This scene can be compared to an idea from Beloved, in which Paul D has been dehumanized to the point that he feels like a rooster named Mister has more dignity than he does.
Native Son – 2
Bigger hates Gus, who is holding out on Bigger’s plan to commit a robbery, because Gus’s fear reflects his own. He fears Gus because if Gus agrees to commit the robbery, Bigger “would be compelled to go through with” it.
Native Son – 3
Bigger thinks to himself “Poor white people are stupid,” because they haven’t prospered, even though they have the social advantage of being white. His mother has given him the impression that wealthy white people like black people better than they like poor white people.
Native Son – 4
After Bigger picks a fight with his running mates, so he can ruin the plan he’d initiated to rob a white man, he’s unconsciously aware of the fact that he feared the prospect of committing the robbery. But he can’t acknowledge this fear. Wright writes, “his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness.”
Native Son – 5
Mrs. Dalton, the woman who owns the house where Bigger works, is blind and ethereal and dressed in white clothing. Her appearance operates metaphorically, suggesting the she and other white people are blind to the individuality of Bigger and other black people. For instance, she is quite interested in helping black people, but she wants to help them the way she thinks they need to be helped. After she talks to Bigger about going to school, Bigger “felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do.”
Native Son – 6
When he’s in his apartment with his family, after visiting the Dalton’s home, Wright writes about Bigger, “He hated this room and all the people in it, including himself.” This may help to explain why he hated Gus, whose fear reminded him of himself. Bigger also thinks to himself that he and his family might be forced to live this way because they’d never “done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much.” Conservatives might agree with this opinion. Liberals might believe the inverse of Bigger’s thought, that his family had never done anything that mattered because they lived in stultifying conditions.
Native Son – 7
Double consciousness is evident in Bigger’s thought that “He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.”
Native Son – 8
Bigger thinks because he is black, Mrs. Dalton would not have been suspected of being in her daughter’s bedroom. He believes he isn’t factored into Mrs. Dalton’s thinking in that kind of social situation, and this makes her and other white people figuratively blind, in the same way that Mrs. Dalton his literally blind.
Native Son – 10
“To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead…” This can be compared to the Kantian notion of sublimity, and furthermore, to the idea that people delude themselves into believing that they are sublime by brutalizing other people.
Native Son – 11
Bigger likes hearing about brutal dictators or perpetrators of genocide because he believes this brutality offers “possible avenues of escape” from the “tight morass of fear and shame that sapped at the base of his life.” Maybe this “escape” is sought by others who try to make themselves sublime by abusing people.
Native Son – 12
Bigger feels secure in the fact that Mrs. Dalton won’t ask him certain questions about her daughter because “She would be ashamed to let him think that something was so wrong in her family that she had to ask him, a black servant, about it.” This maintenance of distance between people that is based on race and class keeps Bigger from being suspected of his crime. It keeps him Invisible.
Native Son – 13
The word “invisible” comes up often as Bigger thinks about what he’s done. Bigger reflects on the fact that by killing Mary, “he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried” and that the act had made him realize that “his hands held weapons that were invisible.” Of his girlfriend, Bigger says “Bessie, too, was very blind” and he has a similar impression of his family, becoming emboldened when he sees “how blind they were.” Other people’s “blindness” makes him invisible.
Native Son – 14
Bigger is proud of the agency he feels behind his invisibility. He boasts to his girlfriend, Bessie, that people won’t suspect him of his crime, saying “They won’t think we did [it]. They don’t think we got guts enough to do it. They think niggers is too scared…”
Native Son – 15
Bigger feels something akin to Kant’s sublimity when he makes his girlfriend, Bessie, worried. Wright writes “He was enjoying her agony, seeing and feeling the worth of himself in her bewildered expression.”
Native Son – 17
In what might be regarded as a reference to DuBois’s symbol of The Veil, Bigger is separated from the white man who he’s tried to frame for his crime as “huge wet flakes of snow floated down slowly, forming a delicate screen between them.”
Native Son – 18
As Bigger hears Mrs. Dalton’s grief over the disappearance of her daughter, he feels safe because he knows he’s “invisible” to her, but he also “felt that he was living upon a high pinnacle where bracing winds whipped about him.” This can be compared to Kant’s notion of the sublime.
The Fire Next Time – 1
Baldwin says his father was “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people thought about him.” Is it double consciousness if you believe what other people think about you, or only if you know what they think but have a separate, doubled, since of self?
The Fire Next Time – 2
Baldwin suggests that he doesn’t just take issue with the fact that white people have committed the crimes they’ve committed against black people, but that they insist on a certain form of innocence, in spite of their crimes. “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
Native Son – 3
Baldwin assures his nephew that America is his country, the black man’s country, asserting that “we can make America what America must become.” How do we relate this point to Langston Hughes’s idea that we should “Let America be America Again,” or Trump’s idea that he could “Make America Great Again”?
The Sun Also Rises – 7
Bill says, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you.” This commentary is interesting not just as it applies to Jake, but also, as a description of the entire generation Hemingway is describing.
The Sun Also Rises – 8
Montoya admires the bullfighters who have “aficion” or passion for the sport, and they all stay at his hotel. He differentiates them from the mediocre or “commercial” bullfighters. The aficionados are incredulous about the idea that an American can have aficion, but they always appreciate Jake after he proves he is passionate by passing what he describes as “a sort of oral spiritual examination.”
The Sun Also Rises – 9
As Jake reflects on the behavior of his friends, he thinks “That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement.”
The Sun Also Rises – 10
When Jake sees the young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, he thinks, “He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen.” This description could make Romero a representative of the natural world that is being threatened by the encroachment of Jake and other American expatriates. Romero represents something from the Old World that is beautiful, strong and natural, but Jake and his friends seem to represent something that is overly-civilized and decadent, in keeping with Bill’s description of expatriates.
The Sun Also Rises – 11
As he talks to Brett, Romero indicates that there is something disgraceful about the fact that he speaks English. He says, “It would be very bad, a torero who speaks English.” This reference to public perception about English corresponds with the idea that American culture, or the culture of other English-speakers, clashes with Spanish tradition. Romero goes on to indicate that Spanish people don’t like English “yet,” and he suggests that for the time being, bullfighters are expected to be more traditional.
The Sun Also Rises – 12
Pedro Romero presents the ear of a bull to Brett Ashley in front of the crowd, after he kills it, but her lack of regard for this totem seems apparent when she leaves the ear “shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.” This could represent her lack of regard for tradition; her indifference to the customs that are important to Romero.
The Sun Also Rises – 13
After their affair has ended, Brett indicates that Romero was ashamed of her because of her style, saying “He wanted me to grow my hair out. Me, with long hair. I’d look so like hell.” Apparently, Romero feels like Brett isn’t sufficiently feminine because she has a short haircut. He symbolizes the traditional male and her modern style defies traditional gender roles.
Of Mice and Men – 1
The first description of Lennie emphasizes his animal-like characteristics. He is described as having “sloping shoulders” and he “walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws.” When he stops to drink from a lake, Steinbeck writes that he “flung himself down and drank from the surface of the green pool…snorting into the water like a horse.” In this same scene, Lennie’s hand is described as a “paw.”
Of Mice and Men – 2
When Lennie tries to keep a mouse hidden in his pocket, away from George, Steinbeck compares him to a dog, writing, “Slowly, like a terrier who doesn’t want to bring a ball to his master, Lennie approached, drew back, approached again.”
Of Mice and Men – 3
George loses his temper with Lennie and reflects aloud on how different his life would be if he didn’t feel responsible for him, saying “God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy.” As he elaborates on this thought, what he expresses seems to typify the determinism that is characteristic of naturalist literature, or the idea that forces outside of a person’s power control their life.
Of Mice and Men – 4
After he loses his temper at Lennie, the solution George imagines is one that dehumanizes his friend. He says, “I wisht I could put you in a cage with about a million mice an’ let you have fun.”
Of Mice and Men – 5
When George is trying to get Lennie hired at a new work-site, he brags about his physical capabilities, saying he’s “Strong as a bull.” But the boss is suspicious because Lennie doesn’t speak for himself, and says “Then why don’t you let him answer? What are you trying to put over?” The fact that George thinks and talks for Lennie at the same time that he emphasizes Lennie’s physical capabilities makes the two of them a good example of the body/mind dichotomy.
Of Mice and Men – 7
After his elderly dog is killed, an old man named Candy says “When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me.” This lament accompanies Candy’s request that Lennie and George take him along to the ranch that they imagine they’ll own one day. He buys in to their dream that they’ll find something more than the mundane routine that typifies their lives.
Of Mice and Men – 8
The black “stable buck,” Crooks, threatens Lennie’s sense of security by asking cruel hypothetical questions. After asking Lennie what he’ll do if George abandons him, Crooks answers the question for himself, saying, “Want me ta tell ya what’ll happen? They’ll take ya to the booby hatch. They’ll tie ya up with a collar, like a dog.” This point reinforces the animal-like way in which Lennie is characterized throughout the novel. But the fact that Crooks himself is referred to as a “stable buck” is somewhat dehumanizing as well, so one interpretation of this scene might be that Crooks abuses Lennie because misery loves company.
Of Mice and Men – 9
Crooks, a black character, disparages Lennie and George’s dream of owning land and compares their dream to ideas about heaven. He says, “I seen hunderds [sic] of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads…Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.” If Crooks’s disillusionment can be associated with modernism, does his perspective support Toni Morrison’s idea that “Black people were the first modernists,” the first to be disillusioned as a result of their experience in America?
Of Mice and Men – 10
When Crooks asks Curley’s wife to leave his room, she checks him by asking, “You know what I could do?” Crooks backs down but she continues, saying “Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.”
Of Mice and Men – 11
When Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife, Candy says, “You don’t know that Curley. Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched.” This reference to lynching creates an association between dehumanized Lennie, who’s often described as if he’s an animal, and black people who were dehumanized, described as if they are animals and lynched.
Of Mice and Men – 12
The last description of Lennie is unmistakably animalistic. Steinbeck writes, “Lennie came quietly to the pool’s edge. He knelt down and drank, barely touching his lips to the water,” and when a bird makes a noise, “his head jerked up and he strained toward the sound with eyes and ears until he saw the bird, and then he dropped his head and drank again.”
To the Lighthouse – 1
Mr. Ramsay is described as brutally honest, in light of the “uncompromising” nature of reality and “lean as a knife.” James, the Ramsays’ young son, who appears to be fully in the grips of his Oedipal complex, believes his mother is “ten thousand times better in every way” than his father and he fantasizes about killing him.
To the Lighthouse – 2
Mrs. Ramsay feels protective towards men because of the boyish reverence “something trustful, childlike” they offer her and other women. In reflection, she contrasts this with what she thinks her daughters feel, the “infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other.” This association between Paris, the mecca for Western expatriates, and the rejection of traditional gender roles goes to the very heart of modernism.
To the Lighthouse – 3
A young, overly-serious man named Mr. Tansley longs for Mrs. Ramsay’s recognition. Woolf writes, “He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession.” This desire for recognition seems comparable to James’s devotion to his mother. Mrs. Ramsay is literally a mother and the archetypal mother figure.
To the Lighthouse – 4
William Bankes remembers walking along with Mr. Ramsay one day when they happened upon a hen and her chicks. Seeing how this scene affected Ramsay, who said “Pretty–pretty” as he looked at the birds, Bankes associates this image with Mr. Ramsay’s decision to settle into the “clucking domesticities” of life with Mrs. Ramsay and their eight children.
To the Lighthouse – 5
Seeing that Mr. Ramsay is upset, Mrs. Ramsay won’t interrupt him but “She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband.” This perhaps unintentional reference to transference can be associated with Freud.
To the Lighthouse – 5
Freud’s family drama is on full display between James and his mother and father. Woolf writes of Mr. Ramsay, “But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them” and by ignoring Mr. Ramsay, James “hoped to recall his mother’s attention.”
To the Lighthouse – 6
When her daughter interrupts their reading, Mrs. Ramsay is somewhat annoyed. Woolf writes, “Mrs. Ramsay went on reading, relieved, for she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable together.” This description recalls the Lacanian idea of the young child not being fully differentiated from his or her mother. The idea that this sense of unity allows the child to experience an imaginary sense of fulfillment that is impossible later is echoed by Mrs. Ramsay’s thought, in a subsequent scene, that James “will never be so happy again.” This scene becomes even more resonant with Lacan’s idea when Mrs. Ramsay remembers that her husband was angry when he heard her say this. Like the archetypal Lacanian father, Mr. Ramsay is responsible for disrupting the contented sense of unity between the mother and her child, so that the child can develop his ego and become independent.
To the Lighthouse – 7
Mrs. Ramsay’s feelings about God can be associated with a modernist lack of faith. “How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.”
To the Lighthouse – 8
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay alternate between their individual identities and their symbolic, archetypal significance. For instance, in one passage, Woolf writes, “And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all…descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them…the symbols of marriage, husband and wife.”
To the Lighthouse – 9
Nature is described as if it is unconcerned with humanity, as if there is nothing in it for people to appeal to, which seems consistent with the modern worldview. As Mrs. Ramsay puts her youngest children to bed, Woolf writes “she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air…” Nature’s apparent indifference can be compared to humanity’s philosophical disdain for itself, reflected in Mr. Bankes’s thoughts: “Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species?”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 1
On the first page of the text, Hurston writes, “Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins,” as a description of the people who’ve been forced to labor all day. This description can be related to a characterization of black women as “de mule uh de world” that is made later by the main character’s grandmother.
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 5
After seeing her kiss a local boy, Janie’s grandmother contributes to the tree imagery that has become associated with her granddaughter by telling her “Ah wanted yuh to school out and pick from a higher bush and a sweeter berry.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 6
Janie’s grandmother offers a distillation of gender and race relations by telling Janie white men rule the world, but they’ve passed their burdens over to black men. Black men, in turn, did the same thing to people over whom they had power, black women. Consequently, black women bear the world’s burdens. As Janie’s grandmother puts it, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 8
After she marries a man she doesn’t love, who her grandmother thinks is suitable, Janie’s first impression of his home is that it looks “like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had ever been.” This characterization can be contrasted with the description of a blossoming tree that Janie imagined her love life would be. In particular, after she imagines “the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch,” she thinks “So this is a marriage!” Later, she cries about her loveless relationship and tells her grandmother, “Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 10
Janie leaves Logan Killicks to marry a self-important man named Joe Starks, who becomes mayor of the small town they move to. During the ceremony for the start of his term as mayor, the townspeople ask to hear from his wife, but he says “Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-makin.'” Even though Janie “had never thought of making a speech, and didn’t know if she cared to make one at all,” this incident still “took the bloom off of things” between her and Joe. This scene can be contrasted with her grandmother’s wish for a pulpit, from which it would be possible for her to “preach a great sermon.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 11
Janie’s husband Joe has a god-complex. He uses the phrase “I god” frequently, in the same why that other people might say “my god.” He also tells Janie “Ah told you in de very first beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice.” This reference to the beginning sounds a bit like Genesis and the “big voice” he mentions can be associated with representations of God from the bible. In the same chapter where this sentence appears, Hurston notes that the phrase “Our beloved mayor” is something people say but don’t mean, much like they say “God is everywhere.” A couple pages after this point is made, a character describes Joe as loving “obedience out of everybody under de sound of his voice.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 12
Joe Starks dies after his figurative death results from Janie’s words. During an argument they have in public, Janie contributes to the notion of Joe’s god-complex by saying “You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice.” Joe strikes Janie after she makes this comment and not long after that, he gets sick. While he’s on his deathbed, Janie tells him they could have had a better relationship if he wasn’t “worshippin’ de works of [his] own hands.” When she keeps talking, Joe says, “Shut up! Ah wish thunder and lightnin’ would kill yuh,” which can be associated with the punishment Zeus is characterized as sending to mortals. Janie goes on though, criticizing Joe’s demand for “All dis bowin’ down, all dis obedience under [his] voice.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 13
When Janie meets Tea Cake, he invites her to play checkers on the front porch of her store and she’s pleased that “Somebody thought it natural for her to play.” This can be contrasted with the fact that Janie wanted to engage in the local folklore by telling playful stories with the residents of her town, but “Joe had forbidden her to indulge.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 14
Janie talks with a prejudiced black woman named Mrs. Turner who thinks darker black people are inferior. She likes Janie, who is lighter than she is, and her thoughts are characterized by the summary “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria.” This character can be compared to a light-skinned black person in Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying who thinks the same way.
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 15
Tea Cake becomes jealous because Mrs. Turner is trying to create a match between her brother and Janie, despite the fact that Janie is already married. As he brags to the men of his community, Tea Cake says, “Ah didn’t whup Janie ’cause she done nothin.’ Ah beat her tuh show dem Turners who is boss.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 16
When a hurricane strikes, Janie and Tea Cake are forced to flee and they come into contact with a “massive built dog” sitting on the shoulders of a cow. Tea Cake defends Janie by killing the dog, but when he contracts rabies, she concludes that “that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all,” by killing Tea Cake. When the disease takes over Tea Cake’s mind, it makes him paranoid and aggressive. He approaches Janie with a gun and she shoots him to defend herself, but she’s heartbroken when he dies.
Invisible Man: 1
In the prologue of the novel, the main character writes “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones.” This reference to sleeping people brings to mind the people Ta-nehisi Coates refers to as “the Dreamers” in Between the World and Me.
Invisible Man: 2
At the start of the novel, the protagonist is “considered an example of desirable conduct” and he delivers a speech on the day of his graduation from high school that emphasizes the idea that “humility was the secret.” This speech and this behavior can be associated with Booker T. Washington, who is regarded as encouraging black people to accept their inferior status in American society in order to gain the right to do menial work and physical labor for white people.
Invisible Man: 3
When the protagonist is awarded a scholarship to a black college, he pauses before a statue of the founder of the school lifting a veil from the face of a kneeling slave. This veil can be associated with DuBois’s concept of the veil that separates people of different races in the U.S., and the fact that the slave has been blinded by the covering ties in to the novel’s themes of visibility and invisibility. Most profoundly though, the protagonist is “puzzled” by the statue, “unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place.”
Invisible Man: 8
The protagonist and Mr. Norton visit a brothel that the patients from a mental institution are allowed to visit. The unruly patients are supervised by an attendant named Supercargo who kicks them down the stairs of the building when they rush to attack him. Supercargo can be associated with Freud’s concept of the “superego,” the aspect of human consciousness that regulates the behavior of the unruly unconscious mind, keeping those primal thoughts suppressed.
Invisible Man: 9
At the brothel, a patient of the mental institution tells the protagonist to watch as he attacks Supercargo, then he says “Sometimes I get so afraid of him I feel that he’s inside my head.” This lends credence to the idea that Supercargo represents the Freudian concept of the superego. After this, the patients repeatedly knock Supercargo unconscious, then revive him “only to kick him unconscious again.”