God as a Bingo Game? Ellisons Despair for Blacks in King of Bingo
Ralph Ellisons 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 basedi.e., situated in a God of mercy and compassion. Instead, it is placed in a lotterya bingo gamewhich serves in the story as a symbol of the cruelty of lifes 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 storys 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 lifethe great mystery at the heart of lifewhich 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 lifeand 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...
The bingo wheel, a symbol of random chance, parallels the unpredictable nature of life where personal agency is often thwarted by external circumstances, a direct nod to Ellison's views on individuality and fate. Through his protagonists tragic fate, Ellison critiques the overt systems of racial oppression and the subtler forms of psychological control exerted through media and consumer culture, as seen in the protagonists film-like hallucinations during the bingo game.
In conclusion, Ralph Ellison's King of the Bingo Game short story can be viewed as a microcosm of his life, literary, and philosophical concerns. His exploration of themes such as identity, power, and existential despair is a representation of his own experiences in life. In his art, he put forward his understanding of the black struggle, and in this story as in his novel he shows the awful force of existential angst.
Works Cited
Britannica. Great Migration, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Migration
Britannica. Ralph Ellison, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ralph-Ellison
Cotkin, George. "Ralph ellison, existentialism and the blues."Letterature d'America15.60
(1995): 33. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=hist_fac
Ellison, Ralph. The King of the Bingo Game. In The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 8th
ed., Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill, eds.
