If He Hollers Let Him Go Essay Example

dog breaking loose clearly implies that there was something to run away from. Throughout the novel, Jones both metaphorically and literally attempts to run away from the circumstances of his black identity, where the dream is the first dramatic depiction of his trying o escape the harrowing confines of racism.

The "heavy stiff wire twisted about its neck" creates a striking image of the dog being sturdily restrained from the world, as it also implies that racism is a rigid and unyielding practice that allows no room to learn of freedom without choking in the process. The fact that the dog is caught after having broken free and is returned to the man - an ultimately superior being - suggests that racism cannot be evaded. Joneses second dream involved 'two poor pocketbooks..

. Beating [him] with lengths of rubber hose" (69).

He describes his ineffective attempts to stand up ND run away, and how when they were going to stop, "The president of the shipyard said, 'Naggers can take it as long as you give it to them'" (69). He goes on to explain how "the colored people looked at the pocketbooks with dull hatred" and how after a fraudulent speech from the president, "they went away feeling good toward [the president] and hating the pocketbooks" (69). This dream underscores the first episode of violence that victimizes Jones into feeling helpless and despairing.

Because the president is able to turn the callous situation Into one that places him under a positive light, the dream rather expounds on the futility of gaining justice in an unethical world. The policemen are described to be "laughing," which Homes uses

as a device to critique racism to its core by emphasizing the fetish for power; once attained, it is used in a condescending manner. The third dream is by far the longest and most descriptive in terms of how Jones describes the setting around him.

Jones loses himself in trying to understand why he "had half a dozen or so grapefruit wrapped in a grey vest and a .

45-scabbier short-barreled revolver" in his hands, and in doing so, he physically loses track of Lice's whereabouts. In trying to find where she has gone, he encounters "a weedy park that slanted down to a river... The park was hilly and rocky and covered with a dense growth of scrub.

.. And millions of swine with bony sharp spines and long yellow tusks running about in the brush" (100-101).

This type of landscape is indicative of the type of world that Jones lives in.

Los Angles is not a mundane flat land constituted of one element, but rather one that is characteristic of hills, turns, slants, and other aspects of wild nature that allude to the intensity of Joneses obstacles as a black man living in a white world. The park is described as "weedy," where it could have just as easily been described as "grassy" or "fertile" had Homes intended to portray Los Angles as a vast space of opportunity as it was so falsely believed to be.

It is also described as "rocky," where Homes could be poking at wordplay by suggesting that Joneses condition is rocky in terms of being unstable in his identity. The swine that Jones encounters in the dream epitomize the

white community, as there are "millions" of them "running around," just like in reality where they outnumber the black population. The swine's "bony sharp pines and long yellow tusks" mirror the spinelessness of whites, where Jones perceives them to be lacking backbones due to their unethical and immoral treatment of the colored race.

The fact that the tusks are described as yellow may possibly allude to people of color, but who are ashamed to associate with their black roots since they are capable of passing off as white.

Alice, for instance, would rather identify with white culture rather than instantly be demeaned as black. Jones berates her for this since he cannot rise above his skin color himself; he is envious, and uses this hatred to spite them by underscoring the fact that they are 'Yellow' and hence at the top of the racial totem pole. After having found Alice in the dream, she looked "like a little rag doll... Ere eyes were closed and her body had shrunk until it was no more than a foot long and she was dead" (101 Jones employs a simile comparing Alice to a mere toy, which carries deep implications about the treatment of blacks in Joneses world.

The little rag doll is a microcosm of Jones' real world; it symbolizes how blacks are considered as objects degraded to a child's mere plaything - something lacking intellect and a human soul - as opposed to people who possess thought and emotion. "There were millions of white women leaning there, looking at [Jones], giving [him] the most sympathetic smiles [he] ever saw' (101).

This highlights how blacks are not

the only people cap blew of becoming commendations, known as those who felt that they had to acclimate themselves to the reality of racism without ever challenging it. Homes infuses an element of naturalism into Joneses dream state by illustrating how people are driven by basic instincts and primal urges that are beyond their control due to social conditioning in this dream, the white omen are conditioned not to lend a helping hand, and thus can only offer sympathy as a reaction.

This aspect of the dream also augments Jones reality where he embodies an existentialist anti-hero, for his own code of morality starkly clashes with that of society's.

He cannot trust anyone but himself, and he has a cynical, despairing attitude that confirms his hatred towards whites since their discriminatory behavior cannot be changed and thus must be accepted. The objects toothaches carries are quite peculiar in that the grapefruit and the gun are in no way related other than the fact that they are inanimate objects that begin with the same letter.

Perhaps Homes may be constructing a parallel between the grapefruit and those who have the ability to transcend their race; Jones identifies the grapefruit's physical nature and its acidic and bitter taste as a personification of those within the black community who wish to pass off as white. Grapefruits are often a shade of yellow-orange; once again Homes - through Jones - draws attention to color, where yellow becomes a recurring motif for racial superiority in an intra-racial world.

Because the grapefruit is a blend of two colors and does not solely represent en, Homes suggests that the grapefruit signifies those

that Jones disdains due to their rejection of black roots as constructed by white society. The grapefruit's yellow-orange shade corresponds to the mulatto shade of Blacks, and the grapefruit's intra NCSC qualities equate to the bitter personalities of those who are black but wish to be characterized and treated as white. Joneses final dream involves a brutal and ruthless encounter between two boys, black and white.

The colored boy was chasing the white boy with a "long-bladed knife.

.. But he couldn't cut the white boy because the white boy pet ducking and dodging and hitting at the back Of his hand. " After several back and forth strikes that left the colored boy weaponless, 'the colored boy picked up the knife with his left hand and began slashing again and the white boy kept on ducking and dodging until he hit the back of the colored boys left hand and cut the tendons" (149).

This dream underscores Joneses active desire to rise above being an accommodation's by retaliating against the racist system.

By attacking the leaders of this system, Jones opts to gain a sense of empowerment in his unconscious that he can never achieve in reality. However, even in his dream state he cannot achieve this. The white boy "was just chasing the colored boy and stabbing him to death with a quarter- inch blade and laughing like it was funny as hell" (150), where Jones experiences futility and a vain attempt to supersede racial segregation. Once more, Homes draws attention to the laughter that ensues post-attack, and recalls the fetish for power to humiliate the black race that was prevalent among whites.

The

description of how the white boy consistently "dodged" and "ducked" the attacks of the colored boy alludes to the reality of Joneses oral; white society can never be "hi and confronted by the plagues of the blacks, and v/all ultimately have the last laugh - literally - in the end. As each dream progresses, Jones describes an escalation in violence in addition to how he feels increasingly more helpless at the end of each dream sequence. At first, he "laid there without thought, suspended in vacancy. There was no meaning to anything; [he] didn't even remember having dreamed" (2).

Shortly thereafter on the next day, he "jumped out of bed" after having overslept, and hardly recollected how he felt after his second dream. The turning point, however, begins after his third dream, where he "woke up overcome with a feeling of absolute impotence; [he] laid there remembering the dream in every detail" (101).

Finally, he woke up and "couldn't move, could hardly breathe. The alarm was ringing but [he] didn't have enough strength to reach out and turn it off... [his] body trembled all over as if [he] had the ague" (150).

Homes corresponds the dreams' effects with the Structure Of his novel: as the novel unfolds and depicts Joneses day-to-day experiences, the dreams get more intense in relation to and as a result of Joneses reality. Where at first Homes portrays Jones as a man whose qualms begin at the corporate level, he later develops Joneses psyche by illuminating his hatred towards the whole of white society due to their immoral segregation of blacks on the grand scale of geographic, socio-economic, physical, and racial

mobility.

Once fueled, Joneses loathing towards whites becomes elucidated past his issues at work, through which readers can understand via Gone

Also notable throughout the progression of Jones's dreams is the extension f Himes's writing style to the stream of consciousness technique. Himes's prose is very controlled and is largely written in an observational style, where he describes everything that is happening from a third person omniscient point of view.