Men as Symbols/Apparitions within “The Intuitionist”

Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist forces its readers to continuously second-guess every character and action within the novel. On a first read, I assumed that the Screaming Man was Ben Urich. However, when comparing the descriptions of the torture inflicted upon the Screaming Man’s and the physical signs of torture that Ben Urich displays, something does not add up. Additionally, when Lila Mae is dancing with the gentleman at the Happy-Land Dime-A-Dance, the details of the reality that Whitehead paints are unclear. These narrative tactics of setting up rules and then flipping them on their very creators seem to parallel the Intuitionist movement; although it is a hoax, as soon as people start believing in it, even the puppet-master buys into the illusion and fails to see the strings. What is real within this novel?

When Whitehead writes of the Screaming Man’s torture, he states:

It cannot be said that the Screaming Man was unaware of his crime. He knew he was trespassing even as he did so. He trespassed for many reasons, for reasons going back several years, for reasons that bided their spiteful time until the moment of their vindication. The moment of the web…Lose five fingers–they won’t grow back, but you still have five more, right? They had cut off half of his fingers (and nailed them to the clubhouse bulletin board beneath the newspaper headline announcing the Justice Department’s latest failed indictment against the irrepressible Johnny Shush) but they hadn’t cut off the other half yet. There’s still hope, the men in the small room never give up hope that they can talk their way out of the mess no matter how hard they hurt, the extremity of their disfigurement. (95)

Here, the Screaming Man is not called by his real name, but is characterized by his crime. Urich was not trespassing, he was reporting. It appears that they do cut off his fingers and also that he is confined in a small, filthy, dark room. My interpretation of this passage is that the Screaming Man’s real crime is one of racial trespassing, not physical trespassing. While I am not certain who he is, I do not think he is Urich for two major reasons. First, when Lila Mae finally meets Ulrich, they do not recognize one another as the Screaming Man and the girl who sees him being dragged from the cell. They are strangers. Secondly, Urich’s injuries are described by him as follows:

“They broke your fingers.”

The pink fingertips at the end of the cast wiggle. “Last Saturday. They got me right outside this office and got tough…Messed up my hand–my writing hand, mind you–and dropped me off at my apartment like I was their prom date. (210)

Urich still has all of his fingers, despite the fact that they are broken. He was not tortured for a length of time, but was dropped off at home after being intimidated and broken. Who, then, is the Screaming Man?

In a similarly ambiguous scene, Lila Mae seeks refuge in a dance club, and dances with “the only colored gentleman waiting to dance” (215). He is described as wearing a suit that is “shiny, returning light in patches on his elbows and knees” and “his hand is rough in hers, a working man’s hand, crenellated by toil…His skin has a reddish tinge, maybe some Indian in there, maybe he’s from the Caribbean” (215). As they continue to dance awkwardly to a song that Lila Mae does not know, she considers this man’s age and the wear and tear that life has had on his body. She also thinks about the massive amounts of rain that the city has experienced, which seems to cue the man’s crying. She begins to talk to him and Whitehead writes, “Who is he to her? A ghost. She asks her partner, who is not her partner now but someone who is dead and will not answer except in what remains of him, his words, ‘Why did you do it?’” (216). It would seem that Lila Mae is conflating Fulton with her dance partner, and that she is looking for a solution the existential crisis of finding out that her life’s work is an illusion. However, since nothing in Whitehead’s novel is what it seems, my analysis might be a stretch.

Overall, the ambiguities set forth by Whitehead within The Intuitionist leave the story feeling unfinished and untraceable. The predictable safety of the course of elevators becomes an illusion, too, and takes with it the safety of the world Whitehead creates and the characters in it.

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