Linda is the Foundation of a Disfunctional Family

I believe that Linda just makes the family's whole situation worse. In the scene in which Biff tells Willy he is going to see Bill Oliver and Willy keeps yelling at Linda, Biff finally stands up to his father. "Stop yelling at her!" he says furiously (Miller 2490). Then Linda has the nerve to accuse him of doing the wrong thing. "What'd you have to start that for?...Come up and say good night to him. Don't let him go to bed that way," she says (Miller 2490).

She is just making excuses for Willy at this point. Maybe if he actually took some responsibility for his actions, he would develop a conscious towards how he treats his family. There is no reason for him to act this way; a grown man needs to have some sort of cap on his emotions and how he expresses them. Linda just expects the whole family to tip-toe around Willy, which does not help in the least. He is creating a real problem, especially with Biff, that needs to be addressed and not brushed over. The problem is that Biff is really concerned about how Willy treats Linda, and it has been an issue ever since Biff caught Willy having an affair with another woman. "You gave her Mama's stockings!" (Miller 2517) young Biff shouts as he realizes what his father had done. We see that he is still traumatised by the change of perception he has for Willy. Presently, he says to Linda "Stop making excuses for him! He always, always wiped the floor with you. Never had an ounce of respect...What the hell do you know about it?" (Miller 2485). If she woudl have seen what was actually happening between Biff and Willy, she would not be so quick as to stand up for her husband instead of her son.

So, no, I do not agree with Happy when he says "What a woman! They broke the mold when they made her" (Miller 2490). In fact, he is speaking from a bias perspective because all the women he sees mean nothing to him, which is why he is content with Willy putting his wife "in place." Unlike Happy, Biff has respect for his mother as a person, not just as a surpressed woman of those times, and this is one of the many reasons why Biff is so outcasted among the family. He has seen the outside world and wants to be his own person, and the others cannot accept that because it is all they have ever known. And Linda is the biggest culprit of this. Rather than keeping the family together, she is forcing and crushing them to the point where they cannot function as a whole.

Invisible Man

In class, we discussed who Ralph Ellison was influenced by in "Invisible Man." Although it says in his introduction that he wished his story to be "read simply as a novel" and not taken as a "statement," I feel that his point of view subconsciously spilled out onto the pages. Readers can see this when the beginning of the text describes the "invisible man" accepting his transparency for the moment, suggesting a Booker-T.-Washington way of thinking. "...I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!" (Ellison 2430), he says. Conversely, the narrator is like Du Bois in the way he gives his speech in front of a menacing crowd and earns a scholarship. Towards the end, he seems to recognize the meaning of his grandfather's dying words; he respects his memory, but pursues on with school, although apprehensively. The author seems to have his protagonist quit his dream of being educated and ultimately decide that Booker T. Washington had the correct ideals for his race. He illustrates this by talking about his dream of his grandfather and the brief case: "It was a dream I was to remember and dream again for many years after. But at that time I had no insight into its meaning. First I had to attend college" (Ellison 2440). So, as he had gotten older, he realized that his grandfather was right to say they needed to stay at the level they were, in order to progress.

I admire Ralph Ellison for accidentally making a statement, although I do not necessarily agree with him. He was a seemingly modest person who felt so strongly about his oppression that one of his greatest novels became a discussion in which carried on for many years. In a way, it serves as an in-your-face towards all the people who ever told him he wasn't capable of doing something, and I greatly respect that. In a way, he did get a chance to finally fight back.