On Being The Target Of Discrimination By Ralph Ellison Analysis

Superior Essays
Memories are what builds a person’s personality and outlook. Collected as a human’s life runs its track, decisions are made based on what knowledge their senses gather and processed through a window of perspective. However, this window itself was formed by memories, its foundation and framework constructed by the experiences of childhood. Impressionable and void of history, what happens in the youthhood may drastically affect all future choices, goals, and relationships to be made. Ralph Ellison narrates the portions of his earliest days in the semi-autobiography “On Being the Target of Discrimination”, where he recalls the effects of racism had on his life. Though his chronological writing, he uses the timeline of his childhood as personal evidence of the effects of racism in the upbringing of a Black child in post-Civil War America. From the very beginning of the work does Ellison grab at the reader’s attention and understanding by creatively writing the narrative in second-person. By writing in second-person, the story can be …show more content…
Despite setting likely occurring during or approaching the Roaring 20’s and the rise of the Blues genre, Blacks were prohibited from most music events. Ellison, who had decided he wanted to become a musician, lamented that he could not join the marching band that lived less than a block away from him and could use his skill on the cornet. The author induces a feeling of isolation and hopelessness by listing the various parameters that would’ve made the situation perfect had discrimination not been a factor, leaving the protagonist to be “surrounded by sounds but unable to share a sound.” Such a statement may be a metaphor to discrimination and racism prohibiting Blacks from voting or having their First Amendment rights. It alludes to how the White desire to suppress the result of the American Civil War and continue to deny African Americans protection under the US

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