Critical Overview
Because a collection of Ellison's short stories has not yet been published, these works have received very little critical attention in comparison to the large body of criticism that has grown up around his novel Invisible Man. For years the stories were difficult to find; they appeared in small magazines and few were anthologized. Consequently, criticism of "King of the Bingo Game'' tends to focus more on the story's relationship to Invisible Man than on the story's position in Ellison's short story oeuvre.
As a precursor to Invisible Man, however, ''King of the Bingo Game'' demands attention. The Bingo King, like the protagonist of Ellison's novel, remains unnamed. He is alienated from his surroundings, and he combines the existential anxieties of the traditional modernist hero with the specific experiences of blacks in America, experiences which only heighten his alienation. Leonard J. Deutsch asserts that the story ''seems a rehearsal for Invisible Man in that it features a nameless character who, despite the absurdity of his situation, tries desperately to manipulate his fate and forge his own identity."
Like James Baldwin and unlike Richard Wright, Ellison claimed a place for himself not as a black American writer, but simply as a writer. Like both of those writers, he examined the plight of the African American in a country that was hostile to his very existence. For Ellison, this hostility serves to deepen the already profound difficulties all people have in establishing an identity. Yet Ellison also felt that the black American experience endowed writers with a special perspective from which to view the historical developments of the century. Ellison discussed this feeling with author John Hersey during an interview presented in Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Commenting on the black author's position in society, Ellison said: "Although we were outside the social compact, we were existentially right in the middle of the social drama. Thus we saw things, and we understood the difference between ideal assertions and cruel realities."
Critical opinion on ''King of the Bingo Game'' generally springs from these principles. Willi Real points out the movement from realism to surrealism in his essay covering Ellison's story included in The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century. Real believes that Ellison is ironically modeling the Bingo King's "development towards ego-identity," and demonstrates the Bingo King's "disintegrating personality." The story is a "total defeat" for the protagonist, and Real quotes Ellison's comment on this: "The nature of society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are."
Pearl I. Saunders' article in the CLA Journal agrees with Real's assessment of the story. For her, Ellison's intention was "to elucidate the complex struggle of the black American for personhood, for positive identity, and for recognition." She agrees that the story results in a defeat for the protagonist but outlines the development of the protagonist's life before the bingo game in greater detail. ''With a false belief in deterministic fate, he revolts against the absurdity of existence and strives towards authenticity," only to find that revolt blocked by the forces of society, which are personified by the bingo caller and the police Examining its symbols, she sees the story as that of the universal search for identity seen through the particularly difficult experiences of the African American. Saunders writes: "The bingo game is suggestive of the chances Blacks take; the nameless protagonist is representative of the unauthentic selfhood created by a repressive society; the bingo wheel is symbolic of the Black American's destiny in an existentialist tradition enforced by a white majority."
"Much of...
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the rhetorical and political energy of white society went toward proving to itself that we were not human and that we had no sense of the refinement of human values," Ellison told Hersey, referring to black Americans. "But this in itself pressured you, motivated you, to make even finer distinctions, both as to personality and value. You had to, because your life depended on it and your sense of your own humanity demanded that you do so. You had to identify those values which were human and preserving of your life and interests as against those which were inhuman and destructive." The Bingo King fails in this; he is unable to make the right choices and to preserve his own self-interest. In the process, he sees his own identity slip away along with the fate that he controlled while he held the button.