Analysis Of King Of The Bingo Game By Ralph Ellison

The quarterback scores the winning touchdown, but the announcer calls out the opposing team. How can this be? The team with the most points should have one, right? Ralph Ellison would agree with this statement, but he understands that some things in life are predetermined who will succeed. In the short story, “King of the Bingo Game,” Ellison expresses the unfortunate bingo game of an African American who should have won, but, being in a racist world, never had a chance. Ralph Ellison yearns for readers to discuss the human condition in an atmosphere of racist ideals in an attempt to critique the social morality and cold relations of the White, capitalistic society of 1940s Northern United States, and how each person has a predetermined destiny

In mathematics, double zeros, also sometimes mistaken as an infinity sign, represent a cycle, a loop that comes back around. The protagonist is said to have been raised in the south, affected by Jim Crow laws. So, in order to escape the endless cycle of race relations, Ellison writes the man to move north, where life was presented as American Suburbia with the ability to change your life for the better. But, Ellison writes that “folks down South stuck together . . . but up [North] it was different” (Ellison 84). Ellison depicts the North as a place where the people are cold hearted enough to “think you were crazy” for “[asking] somebody for something” (Ellison 84). Ellison is pointing out the idea that, although the north has opportunities, the south has family. Similarly, the double zeros play a huge role in nearly gifting the protagonist with a life changing opportunity, but, again, a never ending cycle is infinite. Readers are presented with a similar symbol, train tracks. The thing about train tracks that Ellison utilizes is how they always run from and to the same spot. When the protagonist has daydreams of running along train or subway tracks, escaping the torment of white passengers, Ellison is actually writing how there is always a predetermined path for a person. Even when the protagonist tried to escape the tracks, he looked “back . . . in

Ellison knows, first hand, that African Americans are at a disadvantage as soon as they are born, and writes this in “King of the Bingo Game.” Readers are presented with a pomade wearing white man who is the host of the bingo game, and when the protagonist states that he knows how to win the game, the white man “nodded speechlessly” as though he knew the game was manipulated for a non person of color to win. It is stated that the protagonist thought “it was strange how the beam always landed right on the screen and didn't mess up and fall somewhere else. But they had it all fixed. Everything was fixed” (Ellison 90). By stating this, Ellison is expressing that even when you play by the rules, everything is closely controlled, and that there is a fixed future that can't be controlled by a single person. So, when given the opportunity, the protagonist controlled his future. He had the chance of winning the jackpot, or not, but at risk for embarrassment, he decided to perpetually hold down the button. Ellison writes that this character doesn’t have much control over his life, in order to portray the button as something minute that can be controlled, that a person will hold onto that opportunity even to the point that it hurts them. Race relations in the 1940s were a time where nearly all African Americans had little to no