King of the Bingo Game (1944). Summary and Description

A southern black man now living in a northern city is sitting in a movie theater, watching a film he has already seen before as he thinks about his hunger, his poverty, his inability to find work, and the life- threatening illness of Laura, the woman he loves. Drifting off to sleep, he remembers his fearful life in the South. As he dreams, the sounds he makes disturb the people sitting near him; one of them offers him a drink.

Then, after the film concludes, the assembled audience plays a game of bingo, and the unnamed central character wins a chance to press a button that will spin a wheel, allowing him a further chance to win a substantial jackpot. Pressing the button without letting go, the anonymous protagonist is sure that if he holds the button long enough, he will win. As he continues pressing the button and as the wheel continues spinning, the crowd becomes more and more annoyed, until, eventually, the man is struck from behind by two uniformed men—just as the number he had been hoping for appears on the wheel.

As does Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, this story combines elements of realistic description with even stronger elements of surrealistic fantasy and symbolism. At first the story appears to be a straightforward “slice of life” depiction of the existence of a “normal” (if somewhat desperate) human being, but once the unnamed man ascends the stage and begins pressing the button that controls the wheel of fortune, the story takes on a more fantastic tone and a more obviously symbolic resonance.

The central character—whose seemingly illogical, irrational behavior in refusing to let go of the button is fed partly by his hunger, partly by the whiskey he has been offered, and partly by the sheer hopelessness of his life—represents the frustrations of American blacks in particular, but he also represents the existential despair of any human being who feels at the end of his or her rope. The protagonist’s fixation on winning the prize is driven partly by his intense love for the aptly named “Laura” (the same name given by the great Italian poet Petrarch to the symbolic woman in his collection of poems The Canzoniere); she represents a source of affection and of profound meaning in his life, and his intense desire to save her from death helps explain his otherwise bizarre behavior.

Without his connection to Laura, he would be even more isolated and alienated than he is already; in seeking to save her, he seeks to save his own link to a normal, meaningful, and satisfying existence. His strong compulsion to try to “win” at the game of life is a need with which most readers will be able to identify, and it is partly this focus on beating the odds and preserving his dignity that makes the story seem relevant not simply to blacks but to all human beings. Race and racial discrimination per se are less important factors in this work than they are in some of Ellison’s other fiction (such as Invisible Man, “Flying Home,” or “A Party Down the Square”); in the present tale, Ellison seems to be dealing with hopes, fears, and desires that any person can take to heart.

In this sense, his concerns are existential rather than only cultural. Thus, the hostility the central character faces is as much from black members of the theater audience as from any white oppressors, while the afflictions from which he suffers (hunger, thirst, poverty, alienation, and worry about the health of a loved one) are torments that might easily trouble the life of any human being. If anything, the story is as much about class as it is about race.

Stylistically, the story has a number of strengths: The phrasing is simple, clear, and straightforward; the dialogue is convincingly colloquial; the symbolism (such as the wheel of fortune) does not seem especially heavy-handed; and the odd behavior of the protagonist seems plausible in view of the physical and psychological stress from which he has been suffering. Sometimes the imagery is sharp and vivid (as in the description of the protagonist’s fear that “the rush of blood to his head would burst out in baseball seams of small red droplets”; King of the Bingo Game 133), and sometimes the phrasing seems almost Faulknerian in its use of long, convoluted passages with italicized interjections, as in the following memorable sentence:

He had to get away, vomit all, and his mind formed an image of himself running with Laura in his arms down the tracks of the subway just ahead of the A train, running desperately vomit with people screaming for him to come out but knowing no way of leaving the tracks because to stop would bring the train crashing down upon him and to attempt to leave the tracks would mean to run into a hot third rail as high as his waist which threw blue sparks that blinded his eyes until he could hardly see. (King of the Bingo Game 134)

Passages such as this not only convey—but also recreate in the reader’s mind—the protagonist’s frantic sense of frenzy and disorientation, and although not all the language of the work is as vivid and fresh as the phrasing just quoted, Ellison does manage (especially in the second half of the tale) to achieve memorable psychological effects. Indeed, by the end of the story many readers will have come to share the theater audience’s sense of impatient frustration even as they also find themselves sympathizing with the fanatical protagonist. In style, theme, and impact, this story, with its anonymous central character, seems almost a trial run for Ellison’s Invisible Man.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Read this story alongside Claude McKay’s poem “Harlem Shadows” and then discuss the ways both works deal with such issues as poverty, desperation, the desire for dignity, and the need for hope. How do the works differ in diction, imagery, point of view, and ultimate effect?

2. Compare and contrast this story with Zora Neale Hurston’s tale “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Discuss the role of money in each work, particularly the way a desire for money provokes life-altering behavior in both stories. How is the desire for money of the protagonist of Ellison’s story different from the desire for money exhibited by the main characters of Hurston’s tale?