Symbolism In King Of The Bingo Game By Ralph Ellison

Hospitals are meant to help some people heal physically and others mentally. In the novel One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey published in 1962, readers are introduced to a mental hospital that has goals that do not align with helping people. Within the hospital, characters with varied personalities and opinions are intermixed with three main characters playing specific roles with supporting characters close by. With the characters’ motivations, themes develop such as the emasculation of the men in the hospital by an oppressive nurse. Symbols, such as laughter and the “combine”, are also pertinent to themes as the readers watch the men transitioning from being oppressed to being able to stand up for themselves causing change in hospital policy.

Wright, D. (1997). Getting out of the asylum: understanding the confinement of the insane in the nineteenth century. Social History of Medicine, 10, 13

This brief opinion paper attempts to answer the question, “Where is Psychopathology Located?” -- Is it in individuals, in relationships, in families, or in broader social structures? It will also examine the shortcomings of my position. Some of the points mentioned will be a reflection on the movie, Canvas (2006), which dramatically presents the story of a mother, a father, and their son, in the midst of the psychopathological illness, schizophrenia. In my opinion, the movie convincingly portrays some of the dynamics of mental illness and its effects on the character’s family structure.

In the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, Susanna Kaysen was only 18 years old when she agreed to enter a medium security psychiatric facility in Boston, McLean hospital in April 1967, after a failed suicide attempt. She insisted that her over dose on aspirin was not a suicide attempt, but after a 20 minute interview the doctor decided she needed to be admitted to a hospital. During her prolonged two-year stay at the hospital Kaysen describes the issues that most of the patients in her ward have to deal with and how they all differently deal with the amount of time they must stay in the hospital for. While in the hospital Kaysen experienced a case of depersonalization where she tried to pull the skin of her hands to see if there were bones underneath, after a failed escape attempt. Soon, after going to therapy and analysis she was labeled as having recovered from borderline personality disorder. After her release she realizes that McLean Hospital provided patients with more freedom than the outside world, by being free responsibility of parental pressure, free from school and job responsibilities, and being free from the “social norms” that society comes up with. Ultimately, being in captivity gave the patients more freedom then in society and created a safe environment in which patients wanted to stay in.

African Americans are fighting for their lives in a war that they do not even know exist. In Ralph Ellison’s short story, “Battle Royal,” this idea is made clear by the narrators struggle to be seen as an equal among the white men in the story. Ellison uses a white woman, a blindfold, and an electric rug as symbols to illustrate the struggles African Americans face.

In the short story, “King of the Bingo Game”, published in 1944, Ralph Ellison explains a man’s brief journey to attain freedom from his oppressing and segregating society, while economically assisting his ailing wife. He is granted the opportunity to control his destiny and alter his life forever. He portrays the hope of endless possibilities, as well as anticipated control over one’s future. In the other short story, “The Lesson”, published in 1960, Toni Cade Bambara explores the concept of social and economic injustice during the Civil Rights Movement period. Both of these literary works encompass the theme of predominating one’s destiny to be liberated from a socially and economic society during an era of segregation in American history.

exaggerating symptoms and stereotyping individuals with a mental disorder. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho, in which man with schizophrenia murders guests in a hotel, influences viewers to believe that all individuals suffering from schizophrenia are dangerous. However, that is rarely the case (Polatis, 2014). Therefore, it is refreshing to find a movie that accurately portrays the true personality of and individual living with a mental illness. The movie Silver Linings Playbook chronicles the experiences of Pat Solitano, a man suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder who was recently released from a psychiatric facility. Although this paper focuses on Pat’s experiences, it is important to note that the film not only takes on the task of portraying bipolar disorder, but also mental illness in general with other major characters suffering from a mixture of psychological or personality disorders. The film opens with Pat at Karel Psychiatric Facility in Baltimore, Maryland. We later learn that Pat was institutionalized for nearly beating to death the man with whom he caught his wife Nikki cheating on him. The rest of the film details

During the 1700’s the jails were not only used to confine criminals, but they confined people with mental illness as well. People with mental illness were subjected to inhumane treatment, even when the individual was admitted

“Both the book and the movie are insightful views into societal problems such as stereotypes about the people who have mental disorders. But the film is largely out of date in terms of depicting hospital staff as manipulative or evil. From what I saw when I worked in a similar institution, mental hospitals are a calm, healing environments—as they should be” (Wind Goodfriend, 2012).

In Bly’s time, mental illnesses were not taken seriously. Bly described the asylum she was admitted to as overcrowded, cold, and dirty (ch. 7). It defeated the purpose of trying to give extra attention to those in need. It was easy to get admitted into an institution, but nearly impossible to make it out because the treatment was not treatment.

Unfortunately, asylum founders could only guess at the causes of insanity. Patient after patient was admitted into the state hospitals, but the cause of their disturbance was often a mystery. Many were inflicted with various organic diseases, like dementia, Huntington’s disease, brain tumors, and many were in the third stage of syphilis. With no treatments available, providing humane care was all that could be done. In the years following the civil war American cities boomed and the asylum began struggling to keep up. Soldiers, freed slaves, and immigrants were stranded in a strange land. The asylum became organized more like a factory or small town. There were upper and lower classman, bosses and workers, patients with nothing, and patients with privileges. Sarah Burrows, a schizophrenic and daughter of a wealthy doctor had a ten bedroom house that was built for her on the hospital grounds. Burrows home was just a stone’s throw away from the hospital’s west wing, where over sixty black women slept side by side. (Asylum: A History of the Mental Institution in America). The hospital began to rely on the free labor the patients provided. However, isolating the hospital from the community meant there was no way of knowing what was happening inside the asylum. The asylum became a world apart. In the 1870’s, Elizabeth Packard, a former patient of St. Elizabeth’s, wrote about her mistreatment and abuse

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is a short story based on a fictional village that holds a macabre ritual. Although the regularity was not stated within the tale, the story speaks of a regular gathering of the village folk to conduct some form of lottery. In a disturbing twist of the tale, the winner of the lottery doesn’t get to receive a prize, but instead, suffer the indignity of being killed by getting stoned to death by friends, family, and neighbors. Mrs. Hutchinson is the unfortunate soul, who, despite her pleas and protests has no option but accept her fate. In a similarly titled story, The Lottery by Chris Abani talks about an incident he witnessed when he went to the market with his aunt. In the story, Abani explains how he

The antagonists in this book are his patient from whom he elicits permission before using them. The author uses scenarios from some of his therapy sessions to evoke alertness in his audience as well as to provide a practical framework with which they can relate or be guided as therapists or future therapists.

At what point does an individual come to the realization that they are trapped within an internal perpetual prison? Many women during the 19th century suffered from countless diseases and disorders that went untreated and society had deemed their voice powerless and useless. According to the University of Toledo Libraries “Women were especially vulnerable to inadequate diagnoses and treatment in 19th century America.” It was commonly believed that most physical ailments of women were caused by their sexual organs or mental disorders, resulting in painful, sometimes lethal treatments.” Within the oeuvre of Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” we examine the insouciant approach that society made towards the mental health of women, which ultimately led to the mental instability of countless females.

Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game” was first published in the literary journal Tomorrow in November, 1944 ("King of the Bingo Game”). “The story is customarily examined as a prototype for Ellison’s novel Invisible Man,” but the work was based on his own experience ("King of the Bingo Game”). Ralph Waldo Ellison is a famous American novelist and his novel Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953 ("King of the Bingo Game”). The story takes place in a Bingo Hall up North during the great Migration, in the 1940s (Ellison 242). The story belongs to the satire genre using the third person point of view. The tone of the whole story is sad. Ellison uses characters and symbolism to explore the theme of the hopelessness of people in front of their destiny and the discrimination of the African Americans in the unequal society of America in the 1940s.