I felt particularly drawn to Professor Eric Sundquist’s commentary on the book because I think the use of schizophrenia can really highlight the and bring imagery to mind about what our narrator was going through. To pass as white, you must first hope that no one who knows you are black sees you or calls you out for trying to pass, which we can see this paranoia from our character especially when he is dating his future wife and runs into Shiny, someone from his childhood. The narrator does have to fragment his own identity and try to separate from his blackness in order to protect himself from the racial violence and discrimination that he witnesses in a country that calls itself democratic. I think Sundquist does an amazing job describing the turmoil we see throughout the story of the narrator trying to keep himself from blackness but then identifying with black culture, black pain and trauma, covers him with shame. Shame within himself for hiding his identity and doing nothing to help the black community out and shame in the country that lynches and subordinates entire groups of people. This tension I think is what leads him our of this “schizophrenic style narration” toward the very end, but it was what led him to passing in the first place. All in all, I think this literary criticism is a very interesting but well supported take on the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as it relates to what we’ve spoke about in class too as the narrator is a bit unreliable because he is unraveling his own self conflict in a cruel world.
