Rereading: Brer Rabbit and Samson
I was brainstorming for my essay last week and just sort of poking around in the book to find what I wanted to write about. And so I ended up back in the factory hospital episode and rereading it. And all of a sudden I noticed a whole bunch of things I hadn’t picked up on before. First, I decided to look up who Buckeye the Rabbit and Brer Rabbit were. Their names are mentioned when the doctor is asking the narrator various questions about his identity, and after asking about his name, identity, and mother, he asks about this seemingly random character from the narrator’s childhood. So who are they?
Basically, they’re the same character, more commonly known as Brer Rabbit. Buckeye the Rabbit is another name, but it definitely has some significance if you read the narrator’s internal monologue in page 242 (I haven’t really tried to unpack what he means about Buckeye being what you call him when you’re younger, Brer when you’re older - if you have some thoughts/an explanation let me know). Brer Rabbit is essentially this trickster rabbit character in African American folklore, but was originally a character in various West African tradition. The character was passed down by slaves, with some new characteristics being incorporated. He’s pretty well known from Disney’s Song of the South, which is a Disney movie/cartoon from 1946 (it’s where the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” is from, as well as Jack the Bear which is mentioned in the prologue when the narrator is talking about his “hibernation”).
He was an important symbol of subversion for slaves, but just in general it’s decently common among people who have been oppressed have stories about trickster characters. And I think that’s the point of including Brer Rabbit; he symbolizes the subversive characteristic that the grandfather also described in his dream. The fact that the narrator identifies with Brer Rabbit in this scene is also really important in his developing an identity of his own.
Continuing though, there’s another interesting reference on page 243 (same scene/internal monologue basically). The narrator gets to this point where he’s thinking about how to escape the machine he’s in and he thinks “Whoever else I was, I was no Samson,”. If you don’t know, Samson is a biblical character who loses his strength after getting his hair cut by Delilah, gets his eyes gouged out and goes blind, and then his life ends when he basically tears down a temple on himself and the Philistines, killing all of them. We’d be fooling ourselves to think that Ellison would just reference a blind biblical character without it having some really important meaning.
So at this moment it’s kind of ironic that he says “I’m no Samson” when we know based on the prologue that at this point in the story the narrator is still in a sense “blind”. However, the story of Samson is mentioned here in reference to the tearing down of the temple on himself. What’s interesting is this idea of whether or not the narrator can tear apart the system he lives in without it hurting him as well. Based on the epilogue, I’d say that Ellison would say that he can’t; we know that Ellison believes in America as a nation. So instead of freeing himself by being a “Samson”, he has to look inward and figure out who he is to be free. Cue the line that essentially ends this part of the scene, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free,” (243). Having read the epilogue this scene becomes really important in the narrator's character development.
Just a sort of last note - the narrator can’t remember his name or his mother’s name, but he can remember Brer Rabbit and Samson, which are both probably things he learned about as a child. So perhaps there is also some underlying message about importance of childhood/origin in one’s realization of their true identity.
Also, if you're interested, here's a clip from Song of the South that has Disney's version of Brer Rabbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9oWq9zIXTY
Basically, they’re the same character, more commonly known as Brer Rabbit. Buckeye the Rabbit is another name, but it definitely has some significance if you read the narrator’s internal monologue in page 242 (I haven’t really tried to unpack what he means about Buckeye being what you call him when you’re younger, Brer when you’re older - if you have some thoughts/an explanation let me know). Brer Rabbit is essentially this trickster rabbit character in African American folklore, but was originally a character in various West African tradition. The character was passed down by slaves, with some new characteristics being incorporated. He’s pretty well known from Disney’s Song of the South, which is a Disney movie/cartoon from 1946 (it’s where the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” is from, as well as Jack the Bear which is mentioned in the prologue when the narrator is talking about his “hibernation”).
He was an important symbol of subversion for slaves, but just in general it’s decently common among people who have been oppressed have stories about trickster characters. And I think that’s the point of including Brer Rabbit; he symbolizes the subversive characteristic that the grandfather also described in his dream. The fact that the narrator identifies with Brer Rabbit in this scene is also really important in his developing an identity of his own.
Continuing though, there’s another interesting reference on page 243 (same scene/internal monologue basically). The narrator gets to this point where he’s thinking about how to escape the machine he’s in and he thinks “Whoever else I was, I was no Samson,”. If you don’t know, Samson is a biblical character who loses his strength after getting his hair cut by Delilah, gets his eyes gouged out and goes blind, and then his life ends when he basically tears down a temple on himself and the Philistines, killing all of them. We’d be fooling ourselves to think that Ellison would just reference a blind biblical character without it having some really important meaning.
So at this moment it’s kind of ironic that he says “I’m no Samson” when we know based on the prologue that at this point in the story the narrator is still in a sense “blind”. However, the story of Samson is mentioned here in reference to the tearing down of the temple on himself. What’s interesting is this idea of whether or not the narrator can tear apart the system he lives in without it hurting him as well. Based on the epilogue, I’d say that Ellison would say that he can’t; we know that Ellison believes in America as a nation. So instead of freeing himself by being a “Samson”, he has to look inward and figure out who he is to be free. Cue the line that essentially ends this part of the scene, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free,” (243). Having read the epilogue this scene becomes really important in the narrator's character development.
Just a sort of last note - the narrator can’t remember his name or his mother’s name, but he can remember Brer Rabbit and Samson, which are both probably things he learned about as a child. So perhaps there is also some underlying message about importance of childhood/origin in one’s realization of their true identity.
Also, if you're interested, here's a clip from Song of the South that has Disney's version of Brer Rabbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9oWq9zIXTY
Really good post! I definitely agree with your ending note about how you need to remember your past to figure out who you are. I think cultural things, especially such powerful symbols as biblical figures and symbols of freedom and subversion, are definitely huge parts of who people are and at the beginning the narrator was trying to ignore those parts of who he was. However, after the hospital scene, the narrator does seem to shift towards a much more self aware version of himself and starts to realize who he really is and what he really wants to do. This comes specifically after he is surrounded by symbols from his childhood like Brer Rabbit, Samson, and the yams and I agree that they all played a large part in his self realization.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I actually had no idea who Brer Rabbit was while reading the book and learning that he's an African American icon makes a lot of sense (since Ellison loves to make elusive references). Your analysis of the two references Brer Rabbit and Samson are really well done, and I agree with what you wrote. Also in addition to the ending line of the Epilogue, Invisible Man is littered with foreshadowing, and I think that's really funny and somewhat brilliant at the same time. I'm glad that you wrote about two symbols we glossed over in class.
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