If He Hollers Let Him Go

Several chapters in the novel begin with Bob recounting his dreams. Every dream involves racist violence. As one of the novel’s central motifs, the dreams’ primary narrative function in the novel is to further emphasize just how stressed, scared, and despairing Bob is. These dreams are not so much dreams as they are nightmares, and their content is not far-fetched: As more is revealed about the racist world in which Bob lives, it appears more plausible that a white boy would stab a Black boy to death on a busy street, or that a white officer in the military would brag to a Black man about having raped and killed people of all different races. In fact, readers often see these events echoed in Bob’s real life, such as when Madge threatens to have Bob lynched. Dreams function as a motif in the novel in that they repeatedly show how, on the deepest level, the psychological effects of Bob’s constant experiences with racism reverberate throughout his daily life. His fears and anxieties about these experiences have invaded his subconscious and characterize every dream he has. As the novel continues, it becomes evident that these dreams—or nightmares—are truly no worse than the reality that Bob is living.

A second central motif of the novel is sickness or nausea. Bob has countless encounters and experiences that leave him feeling sick to his stomach and nauseated, and in some cases, he even throws up. These feelings of nausea are a physical manifestation of Bob’s psychological reaction to racism and certain feelings of sexual desire in response to white women. For example, when Bob has his first face-to-face encounter with Madge, he initially feels intense anger toward her, but that anger abruptly morphs into lust. When Bob realizes Madge knows how he feels, he becomes physically ill. In this instance, Bob’s feelings of nausea do not go away until he encounters a young Black girl who flirts with him. It is clear that Bob’s conflicting feelings toward white people, and particularly white women, confuse him to the point of actual sickness. His hatred for white people is so intense that the semblance of a positive emotion toward them very nearly signals him to throw up, as if he can expel the unwanted feeling from his stomach. Most often, however, Bob feels nauseous when he is overwhelmed by the presence of whiteness, when images of white control are so rampant around him that he feels surrounded, like he cannot escape them. This nausea almost seems to be the result of a sort of social claustrophobia. All in all, Bob’s bouts of nausea make evident just how intense his psychological terror, stress, and anger are. To be so overwhelmed by the conditions of one’s life that one becomes physically ill is to be very overwhelmed, indeed.