a title so spectuacularly good that upon reading it, your mind instantly forgot it in order to spare you the shock

Chapters ten and eleven represent a slight shift away from the world of race relations and into the world of high finance and industry. Here Ellison seems to be commenting on the oppression of the proletariat as much as the oppression of the black man, and this expansion into new territory provides some interesting points.

One item of note is the narrator’s isolation within the industrial complex, his inability to function in the factory due to a number of different causes. He fails in his paint-mixing task because, simply, no one tells him what to do (which tank to use when mixing paint). He later fails in his next task due to the isolation created by a union conflict, when the union views him as a fink and a traitor and Brockway views him as a union flunky and a traitor. Either way, he’s a traitor in someone’s eyes, and this puts him in a singular position within the factory. All this is indicitive of the broader alienation found thematically in Modernism, a result of the industrialization of the Western world, a trend which removed individuals from the comfort of small communities into vast urban centers full of lonely one-room apartments.

The other interesting item is the “factory hospital” scene (chapter eleven, I think), which is alarming due to its fractured sense of unreality. We are temporarily removed from the real world as the narrator possibly heals (or is possibly destroyed piecemeal in some elaborate super-villain machine of scary oblivion) (one or the other). This to me is once again a symbol of the increasing mechanization of Western existence, where human beings become part of a process, fuel for machines, lines on a form. All they are ultimately interested in is his name, so they know which lawyer to sidestep.

Hopefully, this was not all gibberish.