Both Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison allude heavily to Old Testament imagery as they illustrate the South American landscape in their respective novels, Dog and Invisible Man. Toomer compares, through spirituals and spiritually derived language, 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 a mostly redemptive force that can, at best, lift blacks out of hardship and, at worst, uphold the status quo of segregation. Ellison, on the other hand, describes the Southern college where 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 unravels, Ellison continues to employ religious metaphors in critiquing the lie of progress he has been taught. Thus, while Toomer more uniformly highlights the good and bad aspects of Southern Christianity, both authors appropriate Sermic language to argue that the palliation of injustice through religious fervor holds back the Southern black community almost as much as it does the white prejudice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Toomer sets 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 the "Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile" (Georgia Dusk 17) which reflects the immaterial, menacing, and unfulfilled cry for salvation that remains after slavery. The smoke is a symbol of prophecy reminiscent of sacrifice and messages to heaven, while the pyramids more directly allude to slavery in ancient Egypt. Toomer confirms this with an unknown narrator's context-free exclamation that "God left Moses' people for the negro" (Carma 14). Toomer makes a clearer connection between the enslaved followers of Moses and the poor African Americans of the rural South, but also implies that the arrival of the God of Moses may not bring the salvation black Southerners had hoped for, as outside prejudice persists with or without internal prejudice. wedding ring. Although Toomer highlights the gospel song's hope-bringing ability in many spiritual poems, he casts 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 and despondent manner: "There was no wind. The autumn sun, the bell of Ebenezer's church, feeble and heavy. Even the pine trees 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. Furthermore, the supposed agent of change – Christianity – like spoiled food, once sustenance, is now poison. In this frame of reference, Cane's early religious symbols reveal their doomed nature pyramid sawdust burned" but "It's a year before one. burns completely. Meanwhile the smoke curls and forms strange wraiths around the trees" and the smoke from the sawdust "is so heavy that you tasted it in the water" (Karintha 6). Toomer's motive for religious turmoil, while still born from the righteous revolt against Pharaonic slavery, now proves to be a persistent and unhealthy influence. Transformed into a spiritual one, the prophetic cry becomes "The smoke is on the hills, or arise / And bring my soul to Jesus" (Karintha 6 per change rather than a threatagainst oppressors, as were the sermons of Moses. As such, the smoke remains and the wind stops blowing, choking the land, symbolically impeding progress away from the pains of discrimination a people helpless and in need of divine intervention, the traditional narratives have become ineffective. Ellison expands much of Toomer's critique of Southern religion by transposing the difficulties of the Old Testament into the life of one man rather than 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 eyes under the summer sun" where "the moon kissed the steeple and flooded the fragrant nights" (Invisible Man 36). For all intents and purposes, the college is Eden, a paradise on Earth bordered by a “forbidden road” that “led to the asylum,” suggesting the immoral and chaotic pre-Fall world (34, 35). According to the biblical tale of the Fall of Man, the narrator encounters sin through his exchange with Trueblood, in whose house he finds "a hard red apple molded in the pond," symbolizing the forbidden knowledge of evil (53). Finally, leaving college, from where he was exiled for sharing Trueblood's sin, the narrator recognizes "the tempting serpent" as "a moccasin moving quickly along the gray concrete" that produces "a sensation that [he] was heading into the unknown,” symbolizing the finality of the Fall (156). The twist on the traditional biblical story comes with the revelation that there is as much sin inside Eden as outside, which is what causes the narrator's fall. When he is expelled, the narrator learns that Dr. Bledsoe, the supposed paragon of upward mobility, "would have every Negro in the country hanging from tree branches by morning if it meant staying where [he is]" (143). His benefactor's overt selfishness and the punishment he receives for doing what he is told push the narrator out of his "mental Eden" into a crueler world of hidden intentions and the sin of lying. The narrator realized this to some extent earlier, when he recognizes that "those who [had] placed him here in Eden" are the hypocritical white founders "who passed their words on to [blacks] through blood, violence, ridiculing and condescending with drawling smiles, and exhorting and threatening, intimidating with innocent words” (112). This feeling, in response to Homer Barbee's stereotypical and insincere sermon on “humility,” comes to the narrator as a suspicion that there is one. a deception that pervades the sanctuary of Bledsoe, however, to truly convince the narrator that his Eden was illusory. mask" African-American independence, as evident in Barbee's exaggerated speech. While inflating the Founder's life to prophetic heroism, Barbee asserts that the students' parents "followed this extraordinary man through the black sea of ​​prejudice, Safe and sound out of the land of ignorance, through the storms of fear and anger, shouting LET MY PEOPLE GO." ! when it was necessary, to whisper it in those moments when whispering was wisest" (120). Drawing on the same parallel with Moses that Toomer also used to ironic effect, Ellison characterizes Barbee's vision of the Founder as an example of a prophet whose belief, while carrying the hope of escaping slavery, it devalues ​​the social value of his followers. Within the claim that the Founder led his people out of the "land of ignorance" is the ambiguity of whether that land is the. South America or Africa, which supporters referred to as such,.