Invisible Man And My Antoni Music Analysis

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the additional narrative layer furnished by artists their music allows the characters to express and identify their internal identity with the external voices of the artists. Music such as the blues and ballads is an essence of writing on an impulse to record down consciousness and painful details of experiences. It is a canon for transcending not only philosophical enigmas, but to allow for listeners to feel and reveal the tragic truth and stories behind the lyrics, and consequently, the characters’ own life circumstances. The act of writing music allows artists to create pleasure and beauty out of painful emotions and historical events. This approach of integrating emotional

However, music also has repercussions of suicide from the sentimentality and despair embedded into the music. Unlike in Invisible Man where the narrator uses music and lyrics to untangle the knots of doubts about his social and racial dislocation, Mr. Shimerda in My Ántonia fails in his attempt to negotiate with the music to define and organize the formlessness of life on the prairie. In this case, where the intent of music fails to provide comfort and epiphany, music thus offers a dark likelihood towards self-destruction. This is so in Mr. Shimerda as his life is a composition of sorrowful events from the loss of his friends; Pavel who dies after an accident at the barn, and Peter who moves away in search of a new life. Their respective departures have a grievous “effect [on] old Mr. Shimerda” (Cather, 39) who broods and wallow in sadness in solidarity. Although his smile is present, it is devoid of meaning as the curl of his lips is “so full of sadness, of pity for things” (Cather, 29) that others never noticed. Additionally, his old age carries lingering “vivid [picture]” (Cather, 59) memories of “how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances” that saturates “the air in which they had haunted him” (Cather, 60). As old age envelops him, he “ha[s] come to believe that peace and order ha[s] vanished” (Cather, 51). His sense of

The ways in which music is deployed is either through the artificiality of the gramophone or the genuine mode of live music. For Ellison’s narrator, the collective action of listening to five gramophones (Ellison, 7) at once offers a connotation of a sense of inclusion, of listening to music as a socially full-bodied experience. His desire of having five gramophones amplifies his listening experience to increase pleasure amidst the city chaos and racial dislocation. While it mutes the deafening noises of the city above his hole, it ironically recreates the deafening noises in his hole as Armstrong’s “Why Do I Have To Be So Black And Blue” overlaps each other over the various gramophones. In the fit of orchestrated chaos is where Ellison’s narrator most attentive and present. Hence, having a collectively conscious listening allows him to locate his sense of self despite his