Quote 61
On my graduation day I delivered an oration in which I showed that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress. (Not that I believed this – how could I, remember my grandfather? – I only believed that it worked.) It was a great success…It was a triumph for our whole community. (1.3)
Early in the novel, the narrator is willing to sacrifice truth for ambition.
Quote 62
"To Whom It May Concern," I intoned. "Keep This N*****-Boy Running." (1.105)
The narrator dreams that the scholarship to the N***o college is really another way for whites to keep him running in place, that a college education won't actually change his lot in life.
Quote 63
Many of the men had been doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a politician, and an artist. One very nutty one had been a psychiatrist. Whenever I saw them I felt uncomfortable. They were supposed to be members of the professions toward which at various times I vaguely aspired myself, and even though they never seemed to see me I could never believe that they were really patients. (3.35)
There is heavy symbolism here: the narrator's ambitions are shown to be hopeless as the black people who take up professions of cook, lawyer, doctor, teacher, and artist are nonetheless marginalized members of society.
Quote 64
How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do – yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision. (6.94)
The narrator expects that sticking to a formula will lead to his ambitions being fulfilled. But that's not how this world works.
Quote 65
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me. (9.51)
Love is not part of the narrator's life because he believes it would interfere with his ambition.
Quote 66
Perhaps the part of me that observed listlessly but saw all, missing nothing, was still the malicious, arguing part; the dissenting voice, my grandfather part; the cynical, disbelieving part – the traitor self that always threatened internal discord. Whatever it was, I knew I'd have to keep it pressed down. I had to. For if I were successful tonight, I'd be on the road to something big. (16.7)
The narrator is willing to suppress central parts of his identity in order to fulfill his ambition.
Quote 67
Still, I liked my work during those days of certainty. I kept my eyes wide and ears alert. The Brotherhood was a world within a world and I was determined to discover all the secrets and to advance as far as I could. I saw no limits, it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. (17.199)
The narrator's ambitions have been transferred from wanting to be Bledsoe's assistant to reaching the top echelons of the Brotherhood. A large part of why the narrator overlooks the more fishy and disturbing aspects of the Brotherhood is that the organization provides an outlet for his ambition.
Quote 68
I returned the miniature, wondering what in the world had made him open his heart to me. That was something I never did; it was dangerous. First, it was dangerous if you felt like that about anything, because then you'd never get it or something or someone would take it away from you; then it was dangerous because nobody would understand you and they'd only laugh and think you were crazy. (2.65)
The narrator does not express love for anything because it endangers the very thing he cares about.
Quote 69
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me. (9.51)
At this point in the novel, love is not part of the narrator's life because he believes it would interfere with his ambition. Later, this turns out to not be the case.
Quote 70
And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man – but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division so I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love. (Epilogue.28)
Although the narrator could easily be in a place of anger and hate by the end of the novel, he realizes in telling his story that it needs to be approached through both love and hate.
Quote 71
A sea of faces, some hostile, some amused, ringed around us, and in the center, facing us, stood a magnificent blonde – stark naked. (1.7)
Both the young black men and the magnificent blonde are sources of entertainment for the white town leaders; their placement in similar situations reinforces this idea.
Quote 72
I felt a wave of irrational guilt and fear. My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked. Yet I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked…Her breasts were firm and round as the domes of East Indian temples, and I stood so close as to see the fine skin texture and beads of pearly perspiration glistening like dew around the pink and erected buds of her nipples. I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs forms a capital V. (1.7)
The naked woman's body enraptures the narrator, even though he knows that she is being objectified in a room full of men. This presages his later dilemma with the adoring fan, when his biology ultimately overcomes his ideology. This suggests that sex is at least one area of human life that cannot be systematized and neatly encompassed by ideology.
Quote 73
Then I became aware of the clarinet playing and the big shots yelling at us. Some threatened us if we looked and others if we did not. (1.8)
In the novel, the black men face a double standard of being seen as either hypersexual or asexual objects.
Quote 74
Another boy began to plead to go home. He was the largest of the group, wearing dark red fighting trunks much too small to conceal the erection which projected from him as though in answer to the insinuating low-registered moaning of the clarinet. He tried to hide himself with the boxing gloves. (1.8)
This young black man is ashamed of his physical attraction to the naked woman. He doesn't want his sexuality to be a source of entertainment for the white men.
Quote 75
I noticed a certain merchant who followed her hungrily, his lips loose and drooling. He was a large man who wore diamond studs in a shirtfront which swelled with the ample paunch underneath, and each time the blonde swayed her undulating hips he ran his hand through the thin hair of his bald head and, with his arms upheld, his posture clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow and obscene grind. (1.9)
Unlike the embarrassed black boys, the white men openly display their vulgar attraction for the naked woman.
Quote 76
They caught her just as she reached a door, raised her from the floor, and tossed her as college boys are tossed at a hazing, and above her red, fixed-smiling lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys. (1.9)
The white men objectify the naked woman as well as the black men, so this is really just Oppression Central as the white men take advantage of both gender and racial inequalities.
Quote 77
But I'm realizin' that she's a woman now, when I feels her turn and squirm against me and throw her arm across my neck, up where the cover didn't reach and I was cold. She said somethin' I couldn't understand, like a woman says when she wants to tease and please a man. I knowed then she was grown and I wondered how many times it'd done happened and was it that doggone boy. (2.189)
Trueblood remembers the moment he viewed his daughter as a sexual being. He later has sex with her body, suggesting that he sees his daughter's sexuality as something he rightfully has control over.
Quote 78
Most of the time he'll be working, and so much of his freedom will have to be symbolic. And what will be his or any man's most easily accessible symbol of freedom? Why, a woman, of course. In twenty minutes he can inflate that symbol with all the freedom which he'll be too busy working to enjoy the rest of the time. He'll see. (7.19)
The vet suggests that a man's freedom can most easily be found in having sex with a woman, suggesting that dominating a woman's body is liberating.
Quote 79
And my mind whirled with forgotten stories of male servants summoned to wash the mistress's back; chauffeurs sharing the masters' wives; Pullman porters invited into the drawing room of rich wives headed for Reno – thinking, but this is the movement, the Brotherhood…
I was heading for the door, torn between anger and fierce excitement, hearing the phone click down as I started past and feeling her swirl against me and I was lost, for the conflict between the ideological and the biological, duty and desire, had become too subtly confused. (19.70 – 19.71)
This is an incredibly un-sexy love scene. The narrator is torn in a million different directions: She's married! Am I being set up? I'm attracted! This is an unequal sexual relationship – is she just using me?
Quote 80
I looked at the red imprint left by the straps of her bra, thinking, Who's taking revenge on whom? But why be surprised, when that's what they hear all their lives. When it's made into a great power and they're taught to worship all types of power? With all the warnings against it, some are bound to want to try it out for themselves. The conquerors conquered. Maybe a great number secretly want it; maybe that's why they scream when it's farthest from possibility – (24.54)
Here, the narrator speculates that women are socialized into certain types of desires – for instance, that power is erotic. As a white woman, Sybil has been taught to fear the power of the black man, but at the same time she occupies a "greater" position (in relation to the black man) because of her race. This dynamic creates a space where she feels free to ask for rape – not realizing, of course, that not all black men are or want to play rapists.