The Dream of the Iron Groom: The Construction and Function of a Symbol in Ralph Ellison’s Unfinished Novel.

Dreams are a central feature of the extended realism of Ralph Ellison’s second novel, some drafts of which have been published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . In this novel, dreams help Ellison’s characters realize or present truths that cannot be presented in the language of straightforward realism. In a quasi- Freudian manner, Ellison’s dream narrations reveal his characters’ and novels’ most fundamental preoccupations. In this article I analyze part of a dream sequence from Book I of Three Days. This dream, had by a white liberal character, is centered on the figure of an iron groom (or hitching-post boy) who cannot be removed from the doorway to a house. I analyze the construction and function of this dream figure and narrative through the lens of (1) Ellison’s ritualist social criticism, (2) his extended-realist, tragicomic, and syncretic aesthetics, and (3) his allusive and narrative poiesis. The iron groom is constructed as a stereotype of blackness, linked to the major black characters of the novel and to figures in Ellison’s first novel. The groom-as-stereotype is subverted through verbal “signifying” and through the development of a tragicomic narrative rhythm. The dream functions to excavate the dreamer’s (and possibly the reader’s) “self-concealed racism” and to point the way toward what Ellison has called “the mystery of our unity-within- diversity.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]