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Critics have long recognized symbolism as one of Ralph Ellison's favorite devices. However, a lesser-known technique, juxtaposition, illuminates the racism theme so prominent in his classic short story "King of the Bingo Game." By contrasting the main character's major fantasy with his real-life situation, Ellison makes more poignant the gap between white and black America in the 1930s.

In her essay "Playing in the Dark," Toni Morrison asserts that in a "wholly racialized society" "there is no escape from racially inflected language" (927). In a postcolonial view of American society, this assertion suggests both that the dichotomous relationship between the colonizers and the colonized is inescapable and that this relationship is reinforced or even constructed by language. The act of naming, then, enforces ideological hierarchies, including what Armitjit Singh and Peter Schmidt term "the socially constructed binary of black/white" in American culture (37). While John F. Callahan, editor of a collection of Ralph Ellison's short stories, describes Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game" as the tale of a "migrant" who "draws bingo and the right to take a turn at the wheel of fortune and the jackpot" (xxxv), Ellison's text seems to comment on the position of post-Reconstruction African Americans as defined by something more than chance. The question at the center of "King of the Bingo Game" is, perhaps, "'who am I?'" (213), for the narrative never names its protagonist, relying almost to the point of absurdity on the use of the third-person pronoun he. When Ellison's story is viewed in terms of Morrison's assertion about the power of language, it reveals a pattern of naming that reinforces the hierarchy which values "whiteness" over "blackness" and suggests that the relationship between white and black remains a relationship between colonizer and colonized.

A Marxist reading would point out that, at its core, the struggle within the story is an economic one: the protagonist desperately hopes for money to save Laura's life. Notably, the protagonist's victory means his winning--in a literal sense--Laura, whose name suggests laurel, elevating his struggle to the level of the ancient Greek hero's; further, the association of Laura with laurel connects victory at the bingo game with recognition as a great poet, as a person whose skill lies in the act of naming. This struggle, however, is underpinned by the lasting effects of colonization. The protagonist "got no birth certificate to get a job" (Ellison 208), and because a birth certificate serves to document a person's origin, the protagonist's lack suggests that he is not merely disenfranchised, but un-franchised; he has not been given the document which allows him to exist in mainstream American society. Significantly, the birth certificate names the individual; from this perspective, it is the lack of a "proper" name that is at the core of the protagonist's economic struggle. Further, the protagonist's name "had been given to him by the white man who had owned his grandfather a long lost time ago" (213), connecting his un-franchised state to the naming power of the ...