IVIV (7): He's So Heavy

[alice wellintown]

Although Larry is short, he experiences, as the Chief and his Father
do in Cuckoo's Nest or as Invisible Man does in Invisable Man, that
fear and definace that Ishmael expresses when he asks, "Who ain't a
slave?"

As Hoberek notes in Twilight of the Middle Class, Organization Man is
made to feel small for any number of reasons not the least of them
being the huge growth of the Organizations and the shrinking plots or
lots he may wander in and about. We see that Larry is feeling the
presure to "get a lot while he is young."  Get a lot of ....what?
Love! Wanna whole lotta Love!  Land? A square plot to die in? What of
his Human rights? Are they also shrinking? Plotted? Lotted?




We have arrived at a key point of the novel and, by an ironic reversal, of
American fiction, a pivotal moment announcing a change of direction in
the plot, a
reversal as well as a recognition scene (like that in which Oedipus
discovers his true
identity) wherein a new definition of necessity is being formulated.
Huck Finn has
struggled with the problem poised by the clash between property rights
and human rights,
between what the community considered to be the proper attitude toward
an escaped
slave and his knowledge of Jim's humanity, gained through their
adventures as fugitives
together. He has made his decision on the side of humanity. In this
passage Twain has
stated the basic moral issue centering around Negroes and the white American's
democratic ethics. It dramatizes as well the highest point of tension
generated by the
clash between the direct, human relationships of the frontier and the abstract,
inhuman, market-dominated relationships fostered by the rising middle
class which in
Twain's day was already compromising dangerously with the most inhuman
aspects of
the defeated slave system. And just as politically these forces
reached their sharpest
tension in the outbreak of the Civil War, in Huckleberry Finn (both
the boy and the
novel) their human implications come to sharpest focus around the figure of the
Negro.

Mark Twain and Huck Finn
By Ralph Ellison
Excerpted from "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity" (1953)

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:12 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sportello becomes a human doorway; fits the name. He also ends up
> three feet tall and this transformation lingers a while after the
> trip. I guess one of the unrevealed aspects of his personality is a
> kind of anxiety about his (real) small stature, which is mentioned
> elsewhere in the book I think. Plus he has that anxiety about his
> littleness in a more figurative sense, with his grudging envy of his
> more successful big brother.