Issue:

№5 2018

УДК / UDK: 82(092)
DOI:

10.22455/2541-7894-2018-5-132-150

Author: Benji de la Piedra
About the author:

Benji de la Piedra (M.A., Independent Scholar, Director of Columbia Life Histories Project at Columbia University, New York City, USA)

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Abstract:

Composed over a nearly twenty-year period following Brown v. Board of Education, Book I of Three Days Before the Shooting… renders an intricate narrative of the identification with blackness, and subsequent ideological transformation, required of white liberals for the meaningful desegregation of American society. This article positions Book I’s narrator, Welborn McIntyre, as a crucial iteration of the racially indeterminate Rhinehart spirit that is the animating concern of Ellison’s second novel. Drawing on a subtle allusion to the fiction of André Malraux in Book I’s opening, this article frames McIntyre’s Rhinehartian transformation as a shamanic ordeal that personally illuminates the Negro core of American cultural identity. The ordeal demands of McIntyre a grueling recalibration of his relationships to the interrelated imaginative landscapes of the American South, Western Europe, and Negro America, which are personified by the characters McGowan, M. Vannec, and Hickman, respectively. While McIntyre’s enlightenment and transformation appear incomplete, they actually require the reader’s critical collaboration to be realized. As a representative of the average white reader that Ellison envisioned during his novel’s composition, McIntyre and his narrative therefore perform a crucial rite of initiation into Book II’s fictive space and the desegregated American truth Ellison seeks to communicate.

Keywords: Ralph Ellison, Welborn McIntyre, Three Days Before the Shooting, white liberalism, desegregation, Negro American, blackness, identity, shamanism, André Malraux, Martin Luther King
References:

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[Ellison 1995] – Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952). New York: Random House, 1995.

[Ellison 2010] – Ellison, Ralph. Three Days Before the Shooting…: The Unfinished Second Novel, ed. John Callahan and Adam Bradley. New York: Random House, 2010.

[Frohock 1952] – Frohock, W.M. Malraux and the Tragic Imagination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1952.

[Rieder 2013] – Rieder, Jonathan. Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and The Struggle that Changed a Nation. New York: Bloomsberry, 2013.

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