Goddamn Lyotard!

When the narrator spots three young men on the subway in zoot suits, I had several questions. First of all, why is the narrator so enthralled by these boys? Hasn't he seen kids wearing wacky things before? Why does he decide to follow them? And most importantly, what is a zoot suit? Here's what I found about the flamboyant zoot suit.  The zoot suit was never exactly invented by any one person, and it isn't connected to any brands or designers. Oversize suits became popular among young, working-class men, most of whom were African-American or Latino, around the late 1930's and early 1940's. These young men, often called "zoot suiters", would buy larger suits and adjust them to make dancing easier. That's why zoot suits have wide pants that taper at the ankles -- you don't want to trip over floppy pant legs while dancing. Zoot suits were usually colorful and were paired with fun hats for extra snazziness. The zoot suit grew in popularity d...

Ellison often uses metaphorical language to convey subtler points about his narrator's situation. My favorite example of this technique is when the narrator is hired to paint samples of Optic White for the Liberty Paint Company. First of all, the company's emphasis on complete whiteness is a play on how the white world expects conformity. The paint helps to enforce society's "white is right" rhetoric by whitewashing universities and government monements, which symbolizes how education and public history are controlled by white power. The narrator points out that black-owned space such as the Golden Day are free from this whitewashing because they don't accept white authority. During the paint factory scene, the narrator must navigate the same questions of submissiveness and subversiveness that his grandfather raises. He ruins the second batch of samples when he attemps to do his job right, and Kimbro is only satisfied by the samples that appear to have be...