Ellison's King of Bingo and Invisible Man

God as a Bingo Game? Ellison’s Despair for Blacks in “King of Bingo”

Ralph Ellison’s 1944 short story “King of the Bingo Game” gives a brief glimpse into the despair of a down south Negro affected by the Great Migration, in need of a little luck to help keep his love Laura alive. His hope is not religiously based—i.e., situated in a God of mercy and compassion. Instead, it is placed in a lottery—a bingo game—which serves in the story as a symbol of the cruelty of life’s irrational randomness, as though it were nothing but a spinning wheel in which there were winners and losers, and a smiling white man running the show, making jokes at your own personal ruin. This is the way Ellison frames the plight of the story’s central character, who at the end is forced to release his grip on the spinning wheel (his time is up), and his reward for his bad behavior on stage is a beating. But for one moment, he thinks he has tapped into the secret of life—the great mystery at the heart of life—which is that it is nothing but a bingo game, and he who controls the wheel controls the world: “This is God!” (Ellison 245). The irony is that he is neither in control of the world or of his own life. Ellison somewhat bitterly appears to be suggesting that everyone is merely a contestant in the great bingo game that is life—and those with the power (like the white man on stage and the enforcers) are the ones who get to be kings and live well. It is a racialized approach to reality, and a godless one, but Ellison is not attempting to write a Christian morality tale or preach the Gospel. The gospel of Ellison is one of chaos, loneliness, powerlessness, and despair. As in Invisible Man, the King of Bingo is just one more iteration of the problem as Ellison sees it: life is unfair for black people, and it is a cruel joke of Fate that it should keep going and going and going. One can see, in other words, that Ellison is already on his way to the basic worldview he would propagate in Invisible Man in the 1950s. He would be accused by his critics of not doing enough to be a voice for social change (Britannica “Ralph Ellison”)—but, as far as he himself was concerned, blacks simply did not have power to be the change they wanted: they could only be king of the great bingo game of life for a moment—but they would never be allowed to be in control of that “game” for longer than that, as the short story suggests.

Thus, one can see in the short story a microcosm of Ellison’s own life and perspective. Ellison himself came from Oklahoma and only really became successful as a writer thanks to a chance encounter with Richard Wright, who encouraged him to take up the profession (Britannica “Ralph Ellison”). This was at a time when the Great Migration was underway, and blacks were on the move from the South to find work and the opportunity for a new life in other parts of the country (mainly in industrialized cities) (Britannica “Great Migration”). For Ellison, life was an existential crisis—particularly for blacks—and their art, or rather his art, came out of this sense of the blues and existentialism being sense-makers of the black experience (Cotkin). Ellison himself may have had some success as a writer and lecturer (Britannica “Ralph Ellison”). However, he still faced in his own personal life the existential dread of living in a world where oppression seemed to be the name of the game.

In the Bingo King story, Ellison suggests that the game is cruel and that the only way to “win” at it is to keep your thumb on the button so that the wheel never stops spinning. But this is an impossible reality. The King of the Bingo Game is not the black man who has enjoyed a small lucky win—an opportunity to spin for the jackpot. The King of the Bingo Game is the power who runs the game. This realization was one that Ellison saw applicable in his own life and time.

Moving to New York City as a young man, Ellison became involved with the Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress Administration, which was a New Deal agency providing work for artists and writers during the Great Depression. This experience is what gave him the opportunity to develop his art in writing. It was his lucky break in a sense: his chance to spin the wheel. It was also an opportunity to see reality up close—the effects of the Great Migration, particular as it showed in the urban life of Harlem, which was a hub for African American culture and arts. The vibrancy of Harlem certainly influenced him to a degree as he saw a mix of hope and hopelessness in the lives of the people he met there, collectively represented in the main character of the “King of the Bingo Game.”

In King of the Bingo Game, Ellison can be seen looking directly at the themes that mattered to him: existentialism and absurdity. These were popular themes at the time and they reflected the influence of his contemporary intellectual environment, which included interactions with key Harlem Renaissance figures and his exposure to European existential philosophy (Cotkin). The protagonist's sense of disconnection and his surreal experience at the bingo game serve as a kind of commentary on the black experience in America—alienated, controlled by incomprehensible forces, and constantly battling against a system designed to marginalize it.