Thursday, December 15, 2016
The African-American Dream
In my group at the beginning of the day, we discussed the significance of the dreams that Bob has at the beginning of the text. The book opens with a seemingly bizarre and unconnected series of dreams that include Bob buying a dog, the investigation of the murder of Frankie Childs, and Bob being laughed at and embarrassed by two white men. Something interesting about these three dreams is that they almost form a pattern; the investigation is clearly racially motivated and the two white men laughing at Bob are definitely racists, Hines putting the two men in a dominating and powerful position. The outlier is the dream about the dog, which doesn't seem to be about anything at all. I'm interested in whether or not these dreams might form a pattern, or if not, the meaning behind the breaking of the pattern. On page 6, Bob admits that "the only place [he] felt safe was in bed asleep." Maybe the first dream about the dog is representative of some sort of economic power disparity, as Bob does not ask to buy the dog but is pretty aggressively sold it. Maybe the first dream is a counterpoint to the increasingly racist dreams, to show how prejudice rules every aspect of Bob's life, starting even before he's awake. Bob says he wakes up scared, and that he feels safe when he's asleep, but maybe he's just bluffing like he does to his friends; we see Bob censer his thoughts multiple times, so maybe this extends even to censoring his feelings from himself. I believe that understanding more about the symbolism of these dreams will help us characterize Bob; how the prejudice he feels every day affects even his deepest subconscious could help us to know how Bob was formed by prejudice, or how he was formed against it, as well as the deeper conscious of black men in the 40's.
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In Bob's first dream, the dog pretty clearly represents something that's been more or less forced on him. And while he doesn't seem to mind it, everyone at home does. As we noted in class, Bob seems to emphasize the blackness of all the African-Americans he meets. Chester Hines writes in a similar description of the dog (he uses the adjective "black" successively in the same sentence), which also has "sad eyes" and "a piece of heavy stiff wire twisted around its neck."
ReplyDeleteBased on all this, Hines could be opening his novel with an abstract portrayal of how Bob relates to his own race (something that's been handed to him that he doesn't really mind but still has to pay for) contrasted with how his society generally sees it ("when I got home, nobody else seemed to like it"). If this interpretation makes sense, it stands to reason that these three dreams are related -- they're representations of how Bob perceives the African-American experience that display more and more explicit racism as they build upon each other.
You might be able to make an id/ego/superego argument about the three-part dream, but that's probably stretching the analysis. However, there's something to be said about id, ego, and superego in the novel's characters. Bob seems to fluctuate between visceral reactions (id; like his interaction with Madge) and carefully-planned murder fantasies (ego; an attempt to combine the id with reality). The superego refers to the internalization of a society's norms; in Bob's case, said norms happen to be highly racist. Could his superego be what keeps him operating within "white rules" and prevents him from going through with the murder?
sidenote: according to Freud, women aren't governed by their superego to the degree that men are (a stance that has earned him a fair share of criticism from feminist scholars). Bob seems to objectify the black women around him and doesn't really consider their actions in the same societal context in which he sees his own. Just an aspect of the text that I personally found interesting...
-Matilda
It interests me that Bob feels like he is safer when he is asleep because the dreams he had seem like nightmares. The dream when the Black men were targeted for the murder seems like a terrifying experience, yet his reaction was to laugh. The targeting of black men for crimes is very common in real life, outside of his dreams. The fact that he is dreaming about these scenarios might be because they are on his subconscious after living through this situation everyday of his life. He laughs in his dream but when he wakes up and thinks about it, he begins to cry. Why does he react differently in his sleep vs. his consciousness?
ReplyDeleteWe have talked about how Bob seems to be controlled by his emotions rather than emoting himself. He also states that his is more comfortable when he sleeps. Is he more in control of his emotions when he is asleep? In his dreams, he doesn't seem to be particularly in control, so why is he more comfortable that way?
ReplyDeleteIs there security in sleep? If so, why isn't this security enough to allow Bob to take control of his own dream actions?