Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game

Title: Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game.'Author(s): Troy A. UrquhartPublication Details: Explicator 60.4 (Summer 2002): p217-219.Source: Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essayBookmark: Bookmark this DocumentFull Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning[(essay date summer 2002) In the following essay, Urquhart discusses the significance of naming in "King of the Bingo Game," which "suggests that the relationship between white and black remains a relationship between colonizer and colonized."]In her essay "Playing in the Dark," Toni Morrison asserts that in a "wholly racialized society" "there is no escape from racially inflected language" (927). In a postcolonial view of American society, this assertion suggests both that the dichotomous relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is inescapable and that this relationship is reinforced or even constructed by language. The act of naming, then, enforces ideological hierarchies, including what Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt term "the socially constructed binary of black/white" in American culture (37). While John F. Callahan, editor of acollection of Ralph Ellison's short stories, describes Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game" as the tale of a "migrant" who "draws bingo and the right to take a turn at the wheel of fortune and the jackpot" (xxxv), Ellison's text seems to comment on the position of post-Reconstruction African Americans as defined by something more than chance. The question at the center of "King of the Bingo Game" is, perhaps, "'Who am I?'" (213), for the narrative never names its protagonist, relying almost to the point of absurdity on the use of thethird-person pronoun he.When Ellison's story is viewed in terms of Morrison's assertion about the power of language, it reveals a pattern of naming that reinforces the hierarchy which values "whiteness" over "blackness" and suggests that the relationship between white and black remains a relationship between colonizer and colonized.A Marxist reading would point out that, at its core, the struggle within the story is an economic one: the protagonist desperately hopes for money to save Laura's life. Notably, the protagonist's victory means his winning--in a literal sense--Laura, whose name suggests laurel, elevating his struggle to the level of the ancient Greek hero's; further, the association of Laura with laurel connects victory at the bingo game with recognition as a great poet, as a person whose skill lies in the act of naming. This struggle, however, is underpinned by the lasting effects of colonization. The protagonist "got no birth certificate to get a job" (Ellison 208), and because a birth certificate serves to document a person's origin, the protagonist's lack suggests that he is notmerely disenfranchised, but unenfranchised; he has not been given the document which allows him to exist in mainstream American society. Significantly, the birth certificate names the individual; from this perspective, it is the lack of a "proper" name that is at the core of the protagonist's economic struggle. Further, the protagonist's name "had been given to him by the white man who had owned his grandfather a long lost time ago" (213), connecting his unenfranchised state to the naming power of the white male. As the protagonist finds and articulates his own feelings of superiority, he refers to the crowd as a group of "poor nameless bastards" (213), and this pejorative expression reveals his own state: he is without money ("poor"); he has "forgotten his own name" (213) ("nameless"); and he has been named by a white slave owner instead of by his father ("bastards").The text establishes the bingo hall as firmly controlled by the white male, and despite the protagonist's insistence that "anybody can win" (212), the language in the bingo hall reinforces the racial hierarchy. The hall, a place where "everything was fixed" (209), is dominated by a "white beam" (209) and is filled with an audience that repeatedly addresses the protagonist in condescending terms: "boy" (210, 211, 212), "fool" (210), and "jerk" (212, 213). The only character to name the protagonist in a positive manner is the old man who calls him "buddy" (209), and their sharing of "not wine, but whiskey" suggests a religious communion and indicates that they are equals in the social hierarchy. Further, the replacement of "wine" with "whiskey" implies an attempt to subverttraditional white power structures to meet black purposes. When the protagonist calls "'Bingo!'" (210), someone from the audience yells, "Let that fool up there" (210); moments later, the protagonist fears that he will "make a fool of [himself]" (211) and feels that the man on stage is "making a fool of him" (211). This rapid internalization of the name "fool" suggests the"double-consciousness" that W. E. B. Du Bois describes as a "sense of looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (3). The protagonist cannot--or at least does not--respond to the "jive talk" and jokes of the man on stage; he simply "nod[s] vacantly" and "grin[s]" (211), allowing his own identity, his own powers of assertion and articulation, to reflect the projection made by the dominant white male.However, at the moment of crisis, when the protagonist asks, "'Who am I?'" (213), he seems to overcome this internalization of social labels. An unnamed member of the audience yells, "'Hurry up and bingo, you jerk!'" (213), but the protagonist refuses this label and insists that "he was reborn" (213), echoing the religious image of the whiskey communion??? and suggesting that he has overcome white subjugation by subverting its power. The protagonist's receipt of power from the dominant white male ("The button rested snugly in his palm where the man had placed it" [211]) and his use of the rules that white society has constructed to justify his remaining on stage (212) reinforce his internalization of American ideology: to win, he must receive the means topower from the dominant white male, and he must follow the rules established by white society. At the same time, the necessity of rebirth before taking a name of power implies that he sees his former, pre-bingo self in the pejorative terms used by the audience.The protagonist's renaming of himself expresses the elation that he feels as he attempts to grasp power, yet it also implies the emptiness of that power. He casts off his old, "white" name and declares that he is"The-man-who-pressed-the-button-who-held-the-prize-who-was-the-King-of-Bi ngo" (213); and, significantly, the story takes its title from this act of naming. While this title suggests that he does hold "a certain power" (213) by defining himself as a "King," it deflates that power by indicating that it is over something trivial: a bingo game. Further, this self-aggrandizement quickly breaks down as the protagonist again internalizes the social messages: "He felt that the whole audience had somehow entered him [...] and he was unable to throw them out" (213). Even as he holds the button, as he grasps power, and as the uniformed enforcers of the white patriarchy threaten him with physical harm, the protagonist "couldn't afford to break the cord" (214). This image of an umbilical cord that cannot be cut suggests the "two-ness" of the African American psyche described by Du Bois (3) and reinforces his inability to define himself except in terms given to him by the dominant white male.The protagonist's intoxication with power brings about his demise, but he recognizes, if only for a moment, the power held by the white patriarchy in American society. As the bingo wheel spins, the feeling of total power that accompanies becoming the master of his own destiny overcomes him: "This is God! This is the really truly God! He said it aloud, 'This is God!'" (212). His equation of control with "God" echoes the images of communion and rebirth and suggests that complete power lies not in control of others, but in control of the self and in hope, however slight, for success. For the protagonist, "God" is freedom from economic desperation and freedom from the nameless condition imposed upon him by the racial hierarchy of American ideology. And, perhaps more than these, "God" is the freedom to hold onto desperate hope and to name himself "the-King-of-Bingo."Works CitedCallahan, John F. Intro. "Flying Home" and Other Stories, by Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 1996. ix-xxxviii.Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: McClurg, 1903. N. p.: Johnson, 1968. 1-12. Ellison, Ralph. "King of the Bingo Game." [Tomorrow. 1944.] The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 6th ed. Ed. R. V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. New York: Norton, 2000. 208-15.Morrison, Toni. "Playing in the Dark." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Reivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 923-35.Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt. "On the Borders Between U. S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory." Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2000. 3-69.Source CitationUrquhart, Troy A. "Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game.'." Explicator 60.4 (Summer 2002): 217-219. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 19 Dec. 2010.Document URL/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420063936&v=2.1&u=shis u&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=wGale Document Number: GALE|H1420063936。