The Narrative Structure of "King of the Bingo Game''
Ralph Ellison struggled through much of his career with his role as a black American writer. Alternately patronized and exalted in his early career, by the 1960s the militant tone of the black intellectual world deemed him irrelevant. Activists of the civil-rights movement preferred the militancy and anger of works like Black Boy, (written by Richard Wright, one of Ellison's mentors) over Ellison's moderate stance. Ellison never felt comfortable with what he saw as the limitations of the genre of "Negro literature." "I am a human being, and not just the black successor to Richard Wright," he wrote, "and there are ways of celebrating my experience more complex than terms like 'protest' can suggest."
Ellison was educated in the two most important "schools" for black intellectuals and artists of the time. He attended Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, the college founded by Booker T. Washington, and lived in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, a period which produced an explosion of critically acclaimed literary and artistic works that originated with black artists living there. He also felt the strong influence of the late nineteenth century's most important black American thinkers: Washington, who argued for tolerance and patience in racial matters; and W. E. B. DuBois, who urged a more confrontational stance.
In 1952, Ellison published Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award and has since gained recognition as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. The novel, modeled after Fedor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, tells the story of a young black man who leaves his small town to attend a school much like Tuskegee, then moves on to New York where he falls in with a radical group. Ellison's protagonist does not see militancy as a legitimate solution, and at the end of the book he remains as alienated from his surroundings as he was in his segregated hometown. In this, Ellison is closer to modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf than he is to writers such as Wright.
"King of the Bingo Game," from 1944, is in many ways a precursor to Invisible Man. As in the later novel, the story's unnamed protagonist does not feel connected to any of the other characters in the story (although he is dedicated to his sick wife Laura, who does not appear except in his thoughts). He seeks to turn his marginality into a mechanism by which he can control his own fate. This marginality is symbolized by his own particular personal situation, his identity as a rural Southerner in the urban North, and his identity as a black man in a white-dominated society. The topics of alienation and control were written about extensively by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The presence of these themes within "King of the Bingo Game" demonstrates the influence Nietzsche had on Ellison.
The story is almost perfectly divided in half. The themes, events, characterization, and even the style of the narration abruptly shift at the halfway point. This is not to say that the story is not unified; each half comments on its counterpart, and complements the other.
In the first half of the story, we meet our unnamed protagonist. He is sitting in a movie theater, watching a movie, and feeling the pangs of hunger as he smells the roasted peanuts that the woman in front of him is eating. Throughout this half of the story, the protagonist is passive and has no control over his surroundings. He is also vaguely dissatisfied: '"If this was down South,' he thought, 'all I'd have to do is lean over and...
(This entire section contains 1777 words.)
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say, 'Lady, gimme a few of those peanuts, please ma'am,' and she'd pass me the bag and never think nothing of it ... Folks down South stuck together that way." We see immediately that he does not feel at home. The solidarity of the oppressed which black people shared in the South is lost here, and the (relative) freedom from the Jim Crow segregation laws is cold comfort to our hungry hero.
As he watches the movie, the protagonist thinks to himself that "They had it all fixed. Everything is fixed." He already knows what is going to happen, not only in the movie but in his own life. He dreams of what might happen if the events in the film were somehow altered. The protagonist's daydream about the white woman removing her clothes implicitly suggests a violation of one of the most crucial elements of Jim Crow laws, the prohibition against any sexual relationship between whites and blacks. But obviously, this does not happen, and the protagonist is trapped in his fate. He is poor and unemployed, his wife is dying and he cannot afford a doctor, and he cannot count on the even superficial friendliness that he would have found among Southerners.
The story begins to shift as the protagonist' 'felt for his bingo cards, smiling." The curtain rises, suggesting the suspension of reality which the stage symbolizes, and the bingo game begins. The protagonist has improved his odds on winning by buying five cards, and although he has difficulty keeping up with the caller's numbers (much as he cannot keep up, financially, with the demands of his wife's illness), he ends up winning. The fact that he ''stumbled up the aisle'' and that the audience refers to him as "fool" indicates to us that this minor victory is not yet enough to save him. As the authorities check his number, he is still at the mercy of forces beyond his control, and he remains so as the bingo caller makes fun of his accent and upbringing.
However, as he takes the button from the bingo caller and prepares to try to win the jackpot, his outlook changes. "He steeled himself; the fear had left, and he felt a profound sense of promise, as if he were about to be repaid for all the things he'd suffered in his life.'' In the second half of the story, the protagonist is transformed: he finally has power, not only over his own fate, but over the entire audience. The wheel spins and spins and he watches it, both frightened and enthralled by the unfamiliar thrill of being in control. "He and only he could determine whether or not [the jackpot] was to be his. Not even the man with the microphone could do anything about it now. He felt drunk.''
The protagonist is drunk with power. The power that the button gives him allows him to step beyond the limitations on his actions imposed by his race, class, and origins. As the spectators watch him, impatiently yelling at him to hurry up and finish, he looks down on them from the stage, both figuratively and literally: "Those folks did not understand what had happened to him ... He watched the wheel whirling past the numbers and experienced a burst of exaltation: This is God!" And as if God was on his side, the protagonist defies a white authority figure, an act of defiance that he would never have dared to commit before. The bingo caller's "hand fell on his shoulder . He brushed the hand violently away. 'Leave me alone, man. I know what I'm doing.'" In the face of the potential jackpot, all men are equal.
The protagonist even takes his newfound equality a step further as the wheel continues to spin madly. The crowd yells at him to come down from the stage, but by now he has transcended not only his race but his humanity. ''He was a long thin black wire that was being stretched and wound upon the bingo wheel; wound until he wanted to scream; wound, but this time himself controlling the winding." With his hand upon the button, he has somehow tapped into the power of the Fates that control the universe.
The spinning wheel as the arbiter of fate is one of the oldest images in Western literature. Ancient Roman literature often refers to the Wheel of Fortune, and in the The Consolation of Philosophy, the Roman statesman Boethius meditates on how the spinning wheel, which once placed him in high and prestigious positions, now has overseen his death penalty from the imperial government. Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde, also uses the concept of the wheel of fortune to explain people's seemingly inexplicable shifting fates. In Ellison's ''King of the Bingo Game,'' the hero clearly has spent most of his life on the bottom of the wheel, and his initial victory at bingo indicates to readers familiar with this image that he will now have the pleasure of fortune's favor.
The bitter irony of the story lies in the fact that the protagonist's triumph is momentary. Confronted by the spinning wheel of Fate, he seeks not to trust in the wheel's wisdom, but rather to control it. The wheel, in the story, is indeed God: it determines the fates of the bingo victors. The protagonist's fault here is another one with an ancient heritage; he suffers from hubris, the belief that one is superior to fate and the gods. By the end of the story, the crowd which he previously commanded is mocking him, stomping and singing derisive rhymes, and the authorities are called. He runs away from them in circles, looking to the audience like an actor in a slapstick sketch, and finally is knocked down and kicked in the head as the audience applauds.
Another parallel for Ellison's story is the Gospel narrative of Jesus before the mob. At first encouraging and eager, the crowd quickly turns ugly and before long sides with the authorities who oppress them. Both the crowd and the protagonist here are black and the authorities are white; in the Christ story, Jesus and the mob are Jewish and the authorities are Roman. In both cases, the individual who is chosen feels separated and alienated from what should be his people.
As in much of Ellison's writing, "King of the Bingo Game" weaves together communal themes of racial oppression and individual themes of alienation. Ellison's refusal to indicate which of the two is more fundamental to his characters' predicaments condemned him to a marginal place both among the modernist writers (who valued the theme of individual alienation above all) and the radical black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s (who felt that racism was the most important topic to explore). However, it is precisely that indeterminacy that helps Ellison capture the complexity of the dynamic between self and society.
Source: Greg Barnhisel, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997. Greg Barnhisel is a writer and editor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Game Theory and Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game'
...Game imagery in Black literature utilizes two major motifs: language as game and the image of gaming itself as an expression of the difficulties that face Blacks struggling toward authentic identity in an alien and alienating culture....
The focus of this paper, however, is on the second major motif: the image of game playing and the theories surrounding games as an expression of both the futility and the special challenges posed to Black culture in contemporary America. Central to this motif is the notion that Blacks are the victims not only of an unfair and discriminatory social situation, but also they are, like all human beings, the victims of fate and chance. Whereas Blacks seem to be playing a game of double jeopardy with the ''deck stacked against them,'' Ellison implies in "King of the Bingo Game, that Blacks must break the vicious cycle of despair and delusion in order to achieve selfhood and respect. The urge to escape into a fantasy realm, the realization that one has nothing to lose, the fear that one can never win because the odds are hopeless, all of these gaming motifs function throughout Black literature, but most blatantly in Ellison's early short story, "King of the Bingo Game.''
In his adaptation of the nameless and alienated hero's dilemma, Ellison depicts a man's transformation from paranoid weakness to a commitment to responsible action. At the beginning of the story the hero is filled with self-hatred and anxiety about his inadequacies as a man trying to survive in a northern urban environment. By playing the bingo game the hero learns that salvation is not something handed to you; it is a goal that one must strive for all one's life. There can be no easy or quick fixes for anyone, least of all Blacks, and to hope for one is to waste one's time and efforts on a mirage, Ellison's short story subtly condemns those aspects of Black culture that would seek to offer Blacks the promise of sudden riches without hard work and diligent responsibility. The numbers game, whose odds of winning are over 75,000 to 1, is a panacea, an illusion held out to Blacks, just as is the bingo game. More cruelly, however, the numbers game drains poor Blacks of the money they do have. By betting on an illusory future, they lose their chances to take responsibility for the present. By choosing to play the game, they actually forfeit their hold on life, on the realities that must be faced if they are to achieve their potential.
Ellison's story, then, is dominated by the bingo game and the wheel of numbers, both games relying on the placement of numbers in a "winning" sequence. The players, though, have no control over those numbers, while the winning sequence is a purely arbitrary result of chance. The application of these two facts to the realities of Black life is, of course, rather blatant. Ellison's challenge as an artist lies in transforming this blatant game imagery into a powerful expression of futility, despair, and ultimately transformation....
As game-theorist Anatol Rapoport has pointed out, the nonzero-sum, non-negotiable games like bingo and the numbers wheel are nuclear conflict games in which each ''player assumes that the other is individually rational, but both can rationalize a strategy which is not collectively rational." He develops this theory by stating that these sort of games raise the ''possibility that the player may be acting rationally and yet the system in which he operates remains utterly crazy in relation to some larger context." Thus, Ellison's protagonist attempts to play the bingo game in such a way that he can rationally circumvent the operations of chance. He does this by playing five bingo cards at once in order to increase his odds of winning But his victory, which he thinks will somehow enable him to save his dying wife's life, is fleeting, for he wins the bingo game only to find that he has to play another game in order to actually win die jackpot....
In order to win the evening's jackpot, a paltry $36.90, the hero has to spin the wheel so that it stops at the double zero, an appropriate symbol for the emptiness of both the game he is playing and his current prospects. At this point the hero realizes that since the birth of his parents and his own birth he had always been handed the "unlucky cards and numbers" in life. As he presses the button that controls the wheel, he becomes filled with "a profound sense of promise, as though he were about to be repaid for all the things he's suffered all his life." The game has assumed for him religious significance, for it must somehow redeem the injustices that real life has inflicted on him. Therefore, he cannot let go of the button because he knows that it "held his fate" and "as long as he pressed the button, he could control the jackpot."
The originator of modern game theory, John Von Neumann, has observed that all games are based on the premise that the game has a "stop rule," an ending that is built into and logically proceeds from the rules of the game. He compares this stop rule to a brick wall erected at the end of the universe, and his imagery is appropriate for the circumstances of Ellison's protagonist. Although the master of ceremonies urges him to let go of the control button, the hero cannot. He is mesmerized by "watching the wheel whirling past the numbers." He experiences for the first time a sense of power and control over his own destiny. He has replaced the domain of fate and chance with his own power and he ''experienced a burst of exaltation: This is God! This is the really truly God! He said it aloud, "This is God!'"
The hero has, unfortunately, fallen into the trap of playing the game and believing it. One is reminded of the vet, a character who advises Ellison's hero in Invisible Man to play the game without believing it. But the king of the bingo game thinks he has undergone a spiritual transformation at this point. He tries to scream his message to the audience; he tries "to tell them the most wonderful secret in the world," that they can momentarily escape the tyranny of fate and chance and take those powers into their own hands. The emcee, functioning as the voice of white society and perhaps its white God, insists that the hero stop pressing the button. Their conversation reveals that the rationality required for two-player games has broken down. Instead while both think they are playing a game, they are actually discussing issues of free will, destiny, and salvation....
But the hero cannot release his grip on the button, for it is his final link with the past. If he releases the control he returns to his old identity as a believer in life as a game. As long as he holds the button he has no identity. He realizes that ''he didn't need that old name; he was reborn...as long as he pressed the button he was The-man-who-pressed-the-button-who-held-the-pnze-who-was-the-King-of-Bingo." This moment of epiphany, of self-ordained godhood, however, is rudely shattered when two men in uniform approach to remove the hero from the stage. He makes a desperate dash to avoid diem and ''discovers by running in a circle before the wheel he could keep the cord from tightening." This is the final phase of the series of games that the hero has played. At this point he becomes a wheel himself, imitating its movement by going nowhere. As the uniformed men wrench the button from his hand, ''the wheel spins slowly to a stop. Without surprise he saw it rest at double-zero." He has won the game, but nothing else. Ellison deflates this moment of the story specifically to show that the game means nothing in itself; it is simply a means to an end and that end is self-knowledge.
At this point the hero recognizes that the wheel is an image, just as games are games and not life. By seeing the bingo wheel as an image, a fictional expression of the powerlessness of Blacks, the hero is able to escape its power over his life and dreams. He realizes that he has given fate and chance, the key elements in any game, power over him by admitting their inexorable ability both to crush and to save him. Ellison takes a qualifiedly optimistic view by insisting on the openness of the universe in opposition to the closed world of games. The hero leaves the stage with a new, albeit muted, attitude of confidence: "Well, let 'em laugh. I'll do what I gotta do."
We have seen that in many ways Ellison's utilization of game imagery corresponds to recent commentators on game theory like Piaget, Caillois, Huizinga, and Rapoport. But there is another purpose in using gaming in both this story and in Invisible Man, in which that nameless hero also finds himself involved in a number of games and is associated with dolls, masks, and machines, Ellison, in an interview with John Hersey, remarked that human beings cannot be treated the way Blacks have been "Without developing a very intense sense of the precariousness of all human life, not to mention the frailty and arbitrariness of human institutions." This frailty and arbitrariness can best be represented in art by the image of games, those make-believe simulations of real life with rules that are as arbitrary and yet as binding as are the rules that govern society.
Source: Diane Long Hoeveler, ''Game Theory and Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game'," in The Journal of American Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp 39-42. Diane Long Hoeveler is the author of several books and numerous articles and reviews.
Symbolism in Ralph Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game'
Ralph Ellison's short story, "King of the Bingo Game," recounts the experiences of an unnamed black man who struggles to survive to be recognized in an environment that insists on catering to his invisibility. This nameless man lashes out against the restrictive and stultifying aspects of his victimized black life style. Faced with a dying wife, Laura, who needs adequate medical care, he engages in a bingo game held at a moviehouse, hoping to win money to defray the medical expenses. Subsequently, he receives the winning bingo card. However, in order to win the jackpot of $36.90, the bingo wheel must stop between the double zero, symbolic of his invisibility. The wheel becomes the interpreter of his destiny. Realizing the meaninglessness of his life, he deliriously revolts against his fate. No longer fate's scapegoat, he proclaims himself the King of the Bingo Game. For the first time in his life, he has control of his destiny; he has temporarily become the determiner of his fate. But fear grasps him; so he is indecisive toward the testing of his moment of control or power by allowing the wheel to stop. He knows that as long as he presses the button, he can control the jackpot. But when the cord is finally extricated, the wheel ironically registers between the double zero. However, the unlucky man finds that he is not allowed to win the jackpot or the game. To elucidate the complex struggle of the black American for personhood, for positive identity, and for recognition, Ellison employs the bingo game to depict life as a risk and a gamble, the nameless protagonist to reflect the social invisibility Blacks experience daily, and the bingo wheel to exemplify the powerlessness of Blacks in America,
Ralph Ellison relates the unnamed protagonist's life to a bingo game, a game of chance. This man is faced with the dilemma of a dying wife who needs proper medical care, but he has insufficient money to defray incurred expenses. Overcome with desperation, he surrenders his humanity to risk his luck, viewing this decision as the price for a painful reality. He has to take the chance of winning the jackpot for his loved one's life and for his own destiny. Since Ellison's hero is filled with self-loathing over his own inadequacies, he feels that "he doesn't have much of a chance. For Laura, though, he has to have faith." The existentialist hero's vulnerability and capacity to be easily victimized is illustrated in the dream of his childhood:
He is a boy again walking along a railroad trestle down South, and seeing the train coming, and running back as fast as he can go, and hearing the whistle blowing, and getting off the trestle to solid ground,...looking back and seeing with terror that the train has left the track and is following him right down the middle of the street, and all the white people laughing as he runs screaming.
This dream revealing the high social invisibility, humility, and alienation the nameless man experiences, is the basis for his defeated attitude toward life that' 'everything is fixed.'' Ironically, the man's attitude is refocused after he wins the bingo game. With a false belief in deterministic fate, he revolts against the absurdity of his existence and strives toward authenticity. The hero, "feeling a profound sense of promise, as though he is about to be repaid for all he has suffered all his life," proclaims himself king of the bingo game. Perhaps now he can gain freedom, continuation of love, and individuality, and a positive self-image; he is no longer life's scapegoat, but a real person.
Certainly, the bingo game is symbolic of the black hero's experiences in white America, because his experiences require a certain amount of risk and determination. Even with certain advantages the chances of obtaining visibility are very rare. Ellison demonstrates this point when he describes the futile efforts of the protagonist to win at the bingo game by using five cards, instead of just one: "Well, not everyone plays the bingo game; and even with five cards he doesn't have much of a chance." In his frenzy, as the self-proclaimed Bingo King releases the cord controlling the wheel, it registers a double zero, symbolic of and similar to the rewards received by Blacks for their efforts, generally nothing.
In addition, Ellison's symbolic employment of an unnamed protagonist represents the namelessness, the invisibility, or lack of identity experienced by the black American. Ellison appropriately places his hero in a darkened theatre, which Edward Guereschi fittingly calls a ' 'modern psychic confessional," to reveal his concept of self and others. "Well, I ain't crazy. I'm just broke cause I got no birth certificate to get a job, and Laura 'bout to die 'cause we got no money for a doctor. But I ain't crazy." This "confessional" not only engenders a self-analysis, but it allows him to rationalize his relationship with others. He is surrounded by indifferent and unfriendly people who treat him as though he were an apparition, a non-existent being, the epitome of invisibility. As his stomach growls from hunger, people around him eat and drink; they never extend their generosity to him. He thinks that
If this was down South .. all I'd have to do is to lean over and say, "Lady, gimme a few of those peanuts, please ma'am,'' and she'd pass me the bag and never think nothing of it. Or he could ask the fellows for a drink in the same way Folks down South stuck together that way; they didn't even have to know you. But up here it is different Ask somebody for something, and they'll think you are crazy.
The anxiety and alienation engendered by these roles explain the protagonist's defeated attitude toward life. Moreover, on having control of the bingo wheel, he rebels against "the unlucky cards and numbers of his days," and he assumes the stance of a metaphysical rebel, when he cries out: "This is God!" Ellison's hero now has temporarily shed his sense of powerlessness, and he emerges from a restrained and insignificant role to one filled with efficacity. Now, in control of his destiny, he can attest to his uniqueness and aliveness. He realizes that his destiny has always been guided by hatred; hatred of self and of his race, caused by the repressiveness of a white controlled and white dominated society. He
stood pressing the button, the voices of the crowd reaching him like sounds in distant streets Let them yell All the Negroes down there were just ashamed because he was black like them. He smiled inwardly, knowing how it was Most of the time he was ashamed of what Negroes did himself.
Having exchanged his birthright for pottage, a mere $36.90 jackpot,
he realized that somehow he had forgotten his own name . That name had been given him by the white man who had owned his grandfather a long lost time ago down South
The unnamed man feels that King of the Bingo Game is a better title and reflects a more positive identity than the one given him by the white man. Holding onto the buttons as if it were his life, he screams, "I can't give it up." Immediately, the destiny of his black heritage becomes a reality as the button is wrested away and the wheel' 'spins slowly to a stop ... at double zero." In this moment of defeat, it becomes quite apparent that his luck has expired; he has failed in his attempt to win the jackpot, that which he has sold his soul for, and he establishes a bona fide selfhood in the game of life.
Undoubtedly, the most important symbol Ellison employs is the bingo wheel, representative of life's destiny and the "system" that decides the fate of Blacks. As the protagonist presses the button of the bingo wheel, he realizes that
his whole life is determined by the bingo wheel; not only that which will happen now that he is at last before it, but all that has gone before, since his birth, and his mother's birth and the birth of his father It has always been there, even though he has not been aware of it, handing out the unlucky cards and numbers of his days
The Bingo King feels that the wheel is symbolic of his destiny, because it determines whether Laura lives or dies. If he cannot control it and win the jackpot, he would be penniless; therefore, Laura would not receive adequate medical care and would eventually die. Likewise, if Blacks cannot influence the "system," so that it also works to their advantage, then they also would metaphorically die. He is enslaved by an understanding that makes his black heritage something more than a mere acceptance of circumstances, because he knows that as long as he presses the button, he can control the jackpot, his life. By holding unto his destiny, the cord to the wheel, he controls the existentialist universal need for identity and self-reliance. Edward Guereschi feels that the bingo wheel represents the wheel of fortune to the Bingo King, who possesses and is possessed by it. He asserts that the wheel is an ironic symbol of psychic enlightenment. The wheel suggests, to the protagonist, a glittering enlargement of life.
Gazing at the glistening wheel (the protagonist) is overcome by the twin desire to regard it as the interpreter of his fate, as well as to ascribe to it his ... despair. As a symbol of destiny, defining his submission, the wheel is in deed the harbinger of bitter truth
Furthermore, Guereschi feels that because of the great impact the wheel has on the protagonist,
he fears to put his fortune to the test of reality by allowing the wheel to spin to a halt. Instead, he remains frozen, pressing the button mechanism that leads surrealistically to his subconscious.
The nameless man's destiny becomes a reality as the cord is torn away from him, and the wheel registers the winning double zero. Ironically, even though he wins the game according to the rules, he loses his individuality. He comes to a full awareness of his place in the game of life.
Obviously, Ellison's emphasis on symbols in the ''King of the Bingo Game'' reflects the suppression of Blacks in an indifferent white America. 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.
Source: Pearl I. Saunders, "Symbolism in Ralph Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game','' in CLA Journal, Vol. XX, No. 1, September, 1976, pp. 35-9.
Slippery Ground: Ralph Ellison's Bingo Player
The Black man in Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game" crosses a "slippery stage"; he feels himself standing on a "slippery brink," left on a "slippery hill." In his efforts to escape from the police officers who will both free him and crush him, he dashes forward, "slipping and sliding.'' To express the protagonist's elusion of the officers, Ellison says "he slipped them ...." After receiving a blow on the head, the bingo player knew his luck had "slipped out of him." This repetition of the words ''slip'' and ''slippery'' is no accident. On the contrary, by this means Ellison, who uses words like a poet, points to the heart of the story. Like the protagonist in Invisible Man, the nameless bingo player wanders on a slippery psychological no man's land, alternately touching reality and swimming in fantasy, and occasionally caught in a mesh woven from the interlocking of both worlds. He drifts between other polar states, also, shifting from despair to hope to a suspension of despair and hope; from a sense of power to a sense of impotence to a confusion of both power and impotence; from a certainty of identity and sanity through an anonymity and instability to a new identity. He moves back and forth between the roles of spectator and actor, between feelings of coldness and warmth, between periods of darkness and light.
The bingo player's slippery hold on reality is both dramatized and symbolized. It is dramatized, first, through his assertions of his identity and the undercutting of those assertions by himself or by Ellison. When the Master of Ceremonies at the bingo game asks him where he is from, he responds, "'Rock' Mont, North Car'lina.'" At this moment he holds two identities—one present and real, one past and fantasy. He is an isolated alien in a hostile Northern city, but he identifies himself in terms of what he remembers as a comfortably predictable environment where he would not hesitate to ask for a handout even from a stranger because "Folks down South stuck together that way " Consciously he contrasts the hostility of the North with the camaraderie of the South. Yet this is the same South which his unconscious has presented to him as inescapably oppressive when, in a feverish dream, he sees himself pursued by a train down the street of a Southern city, "and all the white people laughing as he ran screaming." And this is the South which, at a later point of ambiguous identity, he renounces.
Caught in the spell of the bingo wheel, he forgets his name. In rapid succession, his response to this experience passes from that of a ''sad, lost feeling" to a recognition that the name was not his own but "had been given to him by the white man who owned his grandfather" to a rejection of' 'that old name'' and personal assumption of a new name reflecting his feeling of power: "For as long as he pressed the button he was The-man-who-pressed-the-button-who-held-the-prize-who-was-the-King-of-the-Bingo." Incorporated into this process of rebirth is his question to the audience: "Who am I?''' The answer he receives and ignores suggests an identity no closer to reality than his own:'' 'Hurry up and bingo, you jerk!"' His final identification of himself as winner, based on the wheel's stopping at the lucky numbers, is immediately contradicted by "the dull pain exploding in his skull." He does not know who or what he is; he is unable to perceive himself in relationship to objective reality, past or present.
Closely related to the man's problem with identity is his tendency to cross from sanity to a state of mental and emotional instability. This slippery sanity, however, is balanced by his meditations which suggest, sometimes to the reader alone, sometimes to the bingo player as well, the absurdity of the world he lives in. He becomes, then, a kind of wise fool, though a very different one from Lear's fool. He has no idea that he is cast as fool; he does not stand apart from the world and judge its foibles—he is one of its foibles. His sanity is indeed precarious. Even before the bingo game his self-reassuring thought "I ain't crazy" is shadowed by "a pinpoint of doubt." Within the context of this attempt to evaluate his own rationality, he reflects that for lack of a birth certificate he has been denied the work that would earn money for essential medical care for his beloved Laura. Whether the requirement of the birth certificate is a ruse of prejudiced employers or whether it is a legitimate formality, Ellison's purpose in using the incident is clear. A world in which two people face death—one a physical death, the other an emotional death— because a man cannot produce legal proof of birth is a crazy world. Later, in states of varying degrees of delirium, the bingo player unwittingly identifies the two major symbols in the story. As he fantasizes somewhat unstably during the pre-bingo movie, he concludes that the projection beam will never drop half-way to the screen and the hero will never rape the heroine because "Everything was fixed" and ''If a picture got out of hand like that those guys up there would go nuts."
Later, drunk with weariness, excitement, and two gulps of whiskey on an empty stomach, he leaves the dark world of the mere spectator and enters, for a brief time, the brightly-lit world of actor, only to become hopelessly confused about the extents to which he is simultaneously actor and acted upon. He has a plan, a plan for controlling the bingo wheel which he fully intends to carry out, but even as he reviews that plan, he sees in this wheel the omnipotent, impersonal Wheel of Fortune:
He felt vaguely that his whole life was determined by the bingo wheel; not only that which would happen now that he was at last before it, but all that had gone before, since his birth, and his mother's birth and the birth of his father. It had always been there, even though he had not been aware of it, handing out the unlucky cards and numbers of his days.
In the few minutes of his mystical relationship with the wheel he experiences both supreme power and supreme submission. 'One moment he can think of his power over the audience, the Master of Ceremonies, the laughing white folks down South, his would-be employers: "He was running the show, by God! They had to react to him, for he was their luck." Another moment he can think in panic: "Didn't they know that although he controlled the wheel, it also controlled him, and unless he pressed the button forever and forever and ever it would stop, leaving him high and dry, dry and high on this hard high slippery hill and Laura dead?" He closes the episode in a role of passive actor. He receives the blow from a policeman, but he is still on stage, not in the audience.
Like the wanderer in Invisible Man, the bingo player remains nameless. He, too, is Everyman, bewildered by the contradictions in his life. Ultimately, however, Ellison's view in this story is more grimly negative than that in Invisible Man. Here there is no waiting for resurrection. Slipperiness lies in the stage, the hill, and the brink, and in escape. The security implied in power and freedom is an illusion. The impotence, ignorance, and blind submission of the figures on the movie screen are conditions for sane survival.
Source: Patricia Chaffee, "Slippery Ground: Ralph Ellison's Bingo Player," in Negro American Literature Forum, Vol 10, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp.