Both Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison allude extensively to Old Testament imagery when illustrating the South American landscape in their respective novels, Cane and Invisible Man. Toomer compares, through spirituals and language of spiritual origin, the legacy of slavery in the South to the plight of the Hebrew slaves of Egypt. In this sense, he portrays Christianity in the American South as an essentially redemptive force that can, at best, lead black people out of hardship and, at worst, support the status quo of segregation. Ellison, for his part, depicts the Southern college in which the first part of the novel takes place as a false Eden from which the narrator falls. As the narrator's vision of blissful ignorance unfolds, Ellison continues to employ religious metaphors to criticize the lie of progress he has been taught. Thus, while Toomer more uniformly emphasizes the good and bad aspects of Southern Christianity, both authors appropriate sermonic language to argue that the palliation of injustice through religious fervor holds back the Southern black community almost as much as white prejudice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Toomer situates his scene in the biblical South with both poetic and vernacular references to pre-Exodus Egypt and the enslaved Israelites. One of Cane's most repeated images is "Smoke from the Pyramid Sawdust Heap" (Georgia Dusk 17) which reflects the immaterial, ominous, and unanswered cry for salvation that persists in the aftermath of slavery. Smoke is a symbol of prophecy that evokes sacrifices and messages sent to heaven, while the pyramids more directly allude to slavery in ancient Egypt. Toomer confirms this with an out-of-context exclamation from an unknown narrator that “God has left the people of Moses for the Negro” (Carma 14). Toomer draws a clearer connection between Moses' enslaved disciples and poor African Americans in the rural South, but also implies that the arrival of Moses' God might not bring the salvation that southern blacks hoped for, because External prejudices persist with or without internal ones. faith. Although Toomer emphasizes the hope-giving capacity of gospel singing in many spiritual poems, he presents them in a more ironic light when he uses religion to reflect the stagnation of the Southern landscape. In one story, the setting of a Southern church is described in a static, dispirited manner: “There was no wind. The autumn sun, the Ebenezer church bell, listless and heavy. Even the pines were stale, sticky, like the smell of food that makes you sick” (Becky 10). Throughout Cane, the wind predicts change, so its absence implies a Southern landscape devoid of real moral improvement. Moreover, the supposed agent of change – Christianity – like rotten food, once a source of sustenance, is now poison. Within this frame of reference, Cane's earlier religious symbols reveal their doomed nature. In the first story, “the pyramidal pile of sawdust has been smoldering” but “it’s a year before its time”. burns completely. Meanwhile, the smoke curls and forms strange specters around the trees" and the smoke from the sawdust "is so heavy that you tasted it in the water" (Karintha 6). The motif of Toomer's religious tumult, although still born of a righteous revolt against pharaonic slavery, now proves to be a lingering and unhealthy influence Transformed into a spiritual cry, the prophetic cry becomes "The smoke is on the hills." , arise / And bring my soul to Jesus »(Karintha 6). For change rather than a threat against the oppressors, as Moses' sermons were, the smoke remains and the wind ceases to blow, choking the earth, symbolically preventing escape from the sorrows of discrimination. a helpless people in need of divine intervention, traditional stories have become ineffective. Ellison expands on much of Toomer's critique of Southern religion by transposing the difficulties of the Old Testament into one man's life rather than into the lives of all African Americans in Georgia. The narrator's journey begins on an idyllic but isolated campus "lined with hedges and wild roses that dazzled the eye in the summer sun" where "the moon kissed the bell tower and flooded the fragrant nights" (Invisible Man 36). For all intents and purposes, the college is Eden, a paradise on Earth bounded by a "forbidden road" that "leads to the insane asylum," evoking the immoral and chaotic world before the Fall (34, 35). According to the biblical story of the Fall of Man, the narrator encounters sin through his exchange with Trueblood, in whom he finds "a hard red apple cut out of tin", symbolizing the forbidden knowledge of evil (53) . Finally, upon leaving the college, from which he was exiled for having shared the sin of Trueblood, the narrator recognizes "the tempting serpent" as "a moccasin writhing rapidly on the gray concrete" which produces "the feeling that [ he] was heading toward the unknown,” symbolizing the finality of the Fall (156). The twist on the traditional biblical story comes with the revelation that there are as many sins inside as outside of Eden, which causes the narrator's downfall. When he is deported, the narrator learns that Dr. Bledsoe, the supposed model of upward social mobility, "would have all the black people in the country hanging from tree branches in the morning if it meant staying where [he is] ]” (143). The exposed selfishness of his benefactor and the punishment he receives for doing as he is told drive the narrator out of his "mental Eden" into a crueler world of hidden intentions and the sin of lying. The narrator realizes this to some extent earlier when he recognizes that "those who settled it here in Eden" are the hypocritical white founders "who passed their words to [Blacks] through blood , violence, ridicule and condescension with drawling smiles. and who exhorted and threatened, intimidated with innocent words” (112). This feeling, in response to Homer Barbee's formal and insincere sermon on "humility," comes to the narrator as a suspicion that deception permeates the college sanctuary. However, it takes Bledsoe's overthrow to truly convince the narrator that his Eden was illusory. . Even removed from Fall's narrative, Ellison criticizes the role of religion in the "masking" of African American independence, as demonstrated in Barbee's overwrought speech. While he characterizes the Founder's life as one of prophetic heroism, Barbee asserts that the students' "parents followed this remarkable man through the dark sea of ​​prejudice, safely out of the land of ignorance, through the storms in fear and anger, shouting LET MY PEOPLE GO. ! when it was necessary, whispering it in those moments when it was wisest to whisper" (120). Drawing on the same parallel to Moses that Toomer also used ironically, Ellison presents the Founder's vision of Barbee as the example of a prophet whose creed, while providing hope of escape from slavery, depreciates the social value of his followers in the declaration that the Founder brought his people out of "the land of the. 'ignorance', there is ambiguity as to whether this land is the southern United States or Africa, which has been,.