55 pages • 1 hour read
Ralph EllisonKing of the Bingo Game
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1944A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Great Migration and Dislocation Between North and South
One of the protagonist’s first observations as he sits in the movie theater is that he wishes he were in the South, where he could freely ask those around him to share their food and drinks with him. Instead, he finds himself in a foreign culture that does not offer the sense of community or economic opportunities that he had hoped for.
Like many African Americans of his era, the protagonist has moved from the South, specifically from Rocky Mont, North Carolina, in search of better circumstances in the North. This mass exodus from the South is known as the Great Migration. From 1916 to the 1970s, African Americans from the rural South migrated to urban centers in the northeast and Midwest. People from close-knit communities that contained generations of families and neighbors found themselves in unfamiliar circumstances with people from different states and cities, not to mention the local Black populations that had established themselves in the first wave of the migration.
The dislocation made for a somewhat fragmented culture. The presence of friends or family in the destination location made the transition easier. The protagonist is markedly alone. Laura is the only person to whom he has a connection, and her illness makes her survival uncertain. The protagonist thinks the men in the theater will think him crazy if he asks for a drink of their wine.
After a man wakes him up from his nightmare, however, he offers the protagonist his bottle of whiskey. This gesture, which the protagonist did not think possible, may show that the protagonist’s sense of isolation has skewed his perception of those around him. However, his fears are born out when the audience turns on him when he is on stage. They are just as eager as the white man for him to forfeit his turn.
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and the Rejection of Social Norms
Nineteenth-century Russian author Feodor Dostoevsky influenced Ralph Ellison’s work. “King of the Bingo Game” shares themes with Dostoevsky’s short novel Notes from Underground (1864), in which the protagonist experiences extreme psychological states, including self-hatred, prompted by his rejection of society.
Dostoevsky’s novel takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. The protagonist of Notes from Underground is nameless and is canonically referred to as “the underground man.” He is a recently retired civil servant who feels that society keeps individuals from expressing their free will and true selves. The underground man is acerbic and vindictive, railing against the absurdity of existence and a society that fosters empty conformity. He is highly self-conscious and paranoid, and his knowledge that he is self-conscious and paranoid only increases his mental turmoil.
Like Dostoevsky’s protagonist, Ellison’s main character is an existential hero. One could classify Ellison’s work as psychological realism, as it prioritizes the protagonist’s internal state as the lens through which society is viewed. The difference between the underground man and the protagonist in “King of the Bingo Game” is that at first, Ellison’s protagonist is trying to live by society’s rules. His goal is to live a normal life with enough money to take care of Laura and to have peace of mind.
His mindset changes when he begins to spin the wheel. He realizes that American society will never allow him to lead a normal life; too many generations have come before him who have had their lives and livelihoods taken by the whims of white people and the institutions they serve. The only control he can exercise is to keep spinning the wheel. This constitutes his rejection of society’s norms; in Jim Crow America, Black people were not supposed to control their own fates.
Both Dostoevsky and Ellison’s protagonists try to reclaim a self of self by rejecting the society that devalues them, and in both cases, the more they try to achieve an authentic form of self-expression, the more delusional and unhinged they become. The texts have many differences, but the important commonality is the high personal and psychological cost of rejecting the norms of a society in which the outcome for certain individuals is predetermined.
Invisible Man and African Americans Coming of Age Through Existential Crisis
“King of the Bingo Game” is the last short story Ellison published before his seminal novel Invisible Man in 1953. Many of the novel’s themes, particularly the trauma of a Black man’s coming of age in the United States, are built into the short story.
Both narratives feature a nameless protagonist who is a recent transplant from the South and feels disoriented in his new home. Due to American racism, Ellison’s protagonists are both visible and invisible. They are invisible and therefore disempowered when they follow society’s rules, and they are visible to a life-threatening degree when they break them. They internalize the duality of their invisibility and the self-loathing, delusion, and paranoia that come with it. In “King of the Bingo Game,” the protagonist forgets his own name and becomes alienated from himself. He must ask, “Who Am I?” (475). The invisible man does not have a name to begin with.
As in any coming-of-age narrative, Ellison’s protagonists undergo transformations through experiences that deepen their self-knowledge. Instead of leading toward independence, their transformation propels them to a dark realization that their fate, like those in the generations before them, is already sealed. Instead of leading to empowerment, their coming-of-age through existential crisis increases their self-loathing and shame.
The short story’s protagonist dreams of escaping a train only to have it veer off the tracks and run him down while white people mock him and laugh at him “while he ran screaming” (470). The dream symbolizes that even when he seems to escape danger, the rules of the game change so that danger follows him. In the dream he is a child, which means that he has learned this lesson from a young age. There is a similar scene in Invisible Man in which, for a group of whites men’s entertainment, young Black men are forced to try to pick up coins off an electrified rug. The one who gets the most wins a scholarship to a prestigious Black college. Like the protagonist in “King of the Bingo Game,” the narrator in Invisible Man has nightmares about the event.
This type of trial-by-humiliation is a common theme in Ellison’s work and shows the undue psychological and emotional stress that African Americans must endure to learn the rules of the adult world. For them, growing up means coming to understand the crushing realities of racism through traumas so great that they lead to existential crises and imprint a sense of self-loathing. The inhumanity of the individuals and institutions that uphold racism escape retribution because they have the power of the law and its enforcement on their side, even when their activities are illegal.
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