| Title | : | King of the Bingo Game |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle , Hardcover , Paperback , Audiobook & More |
| Number of Pages | : | 7 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1944 |
King of the Bingo Game Reviews
-
What a masterpiece of literary symbolism, and what a sad one.
-
2 stars // read November 2022
-
i am so confused
-
"...and he knew even as it slipped out of him that his luck had run out on the stage."
I read this story as a part of
Flying Home: And Other Stories. I plan to do a general overview of Ellison's short stories when I review FH&OS, but I wanted to mention this story because it was Ellison's first major work of fiction (at least in Ellison's eyes) and is an interesting story. This story is about our fictional "King" who is originally from North Carolina, but is struggling to make a living in Harlem. When he walks into a bingo hall to compete for a cash prize, all the pressures of his life start to close in on him. A good, early story by Ellison. -
Incredibly symbolic, and we haven't even analysed it in class; looking forward to it.
-
Despair oozing off the page. How I wish the woman would have offered him peanuts instead of the Whiskey the men provided fast-forwarding him to his end. Poverty. Hunger. Thirst. Sleep deprivation. Unemployment. Illness. Worry. Anguish. What luck.
Anyone who has come to the precipice of a mental break knows what this character is facing.
“… Don't push me/
'Cause I'm close to the edge/
I'm trying not to lose my head
Ah-huh-huh-huh…”
-Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five
Lord I pray that you keep your loving hand upon your Native Son’s and pull them away from such despair. Amen. -
A short but intense read. I can't wait to analyse it in class.
-
Read this a while back for my Lit Crit class. A symbolic short story exploring fate/destiny through the lens of race. It's more than just a bingo game, it's life.
-
Emotional portrayal of a nameless black man from the South struggling with a cold, unfamiliar, distant, mocking North and desperately trying to win money at a bingo game to save his dying wife.
His folly is thinking that he can control the bingo game, which, being low stakes gambling and thus a game of chance and luck, which means a game of randomness and unpredictability, is foolishness.
Yet, to him, he has found the secret to controlling one’s luck/life, and it is in the bingo button. Hold it long enough and you increase your chance at winning, which in the story is a double-edged sword.
Interestingly, the man seems to experience something akin to the Sufi whirling dervish in losing himself in the swirl and whirl of the bingo wheel. He talks about feeling the need to submit to it.
But, while the dervish’s submission means acceptance of God’s goodness and rejection of his own ego (the “I”; the self), this man’s link to the “God power” makes him “drunk” and charges him up thinking he can control it when no man can.
This is the sad thing that he fails to understand. And so, the title mocks him and his quest and pities him.
While emotional and likely well paced due to being a short story, the snap psychotic break and ensuing frenetic nature of the man’s “epiphany” and capture felt forced, didactic, and eye-rollingly drawn out to an obvious conclusion. -
Short but SO intense. I think this explains how black people in the US have had to fight so much for their lives to only get mistreated and even murdered. I love this kind of works.
We just analysed it in class :
-I really enjoyed the relationship of the beam of light (in the film they’re watching, in the proyector and on the stage lights) with power and even as the main characters says “God”.
-This denounces perfectly how only white working men could achieve The American Dream ( I mean… black people didn’t even have a birth certificate?!)
- The is a denouncement of the North states that I really enjoyed because in the civil war the north is portrayed as the good side and although “they were” there were also discriminating so.. yeah it is fresh to see someone talk about it.
Also there are MANY similarities with Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” and some with Hughe’s “The wall” so I recommend these if you liked it and want to read more interpretations of this topics. -
It is the ultimate exercise of futility. The inevitable pain, doom, and destruction permeate the page, and the conclusion, where the protagonist wins the game of chance only to be hit into unconsciousness by the security detail, is a dose of irony and a mountain of Sisyphean proportions.
Ralph Ellison utilizes setting, point of view, tone, symbol, and imagery to explore a variety of themes--race in America, fate, freewill, hope, madness, isolation, and desperation. The story’s violence and madness are symbolic of the results of systemic racism on an individual and culture. -
Sencillo, ameno y con muchas similitudes a La Perla de Steinbeck.
-
read for 175 literature class
-
read this for my lit class. loved the symbolism!! i wish we could’ve learned more about his background, but i love the mysterious element it adds nonetheless.
-
The ending was incredibly sad.
-
This is God!
-
7 pages, yet so many symbols and ways to interpret the story.
-
This guy literally held a button for 4 pages….the story is 7 pages
-
- read for ap lit -
-
Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) is best known for Invisible Man (1952), his highly acclaimed novel set in the 1930s, as is this short story, copyrighted in 1944. As in Invisible Man, the protagonist is a nameless Afro-American, in this case an unemployed black, originally from down South who is in New York whose hunger, hope and despairing defiance leads him into a personal epiphany as he spins the wheel which might allow him to win the evening's jackpot:
He watched the wheel whirling past the numbers and experienced a burst of exaltation: This is God! This is the really truly God! He said it aloud, "This is God!"
The story is perfecty paced and spins the protagonist's rising delirious certainty against the audience's growing, impatient,mocking heckling until the ending crashes down with all the bitter weight of injustice.
Ellison's short stories were never collected until after his death (Flying Home and Other Stories , 1996). I came across King of the Bingo Game in Fiction 100, an excellent 1988 anthology of short stories selected by James H. Pickering.
