Irony in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a book of irony upon irony. Not a true autobiography but a novel based loosely on the author's life, the book portrays the life of a man of mixed black and white heritage who undergoes a series of unexpected reversals of consciousness largely based on his racial experiences. The protagonist appears to be white and is raised as a white of some socioeconomic privilege. His primary awakenings take him from his white upbringing into the world of blacks, where he comes to recognize and appreciate his black heritage, and finally back to the white world after his abandonment of that black heritage. Ironically, however, this series of awakenings leaves the protagonist as confused about his identity at the end of the book as he was in the beginning. The bulk of the book's ironies are rooted in the protagonist's almost obstinate determination to discover his own reality, a determination which in fact prevents him from such a discovery because of his obsessive intellectualization. The man's story is a tragedy because he is trapped between the two worlds, never truly a part of either, and his situation is beyond his control. He does indeed make the final choice to marry a white woman and live in the white world, turning his back on the black world, but by that time it has become clear that personal and social forces beyond his control have rendered him helpless to find the racial home he seeks. His intellectualization ren
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sagree vehemently with this statement, but it is unlikely that he would show any emotion in doing so. The essential irony of his life, again, is that he is trying to come to grips with emotional traumas in his life using mental tools which prevent him from ever coming to grips with those traumas. For example, he analyzes the traumatic discovery of his black heritage in abstract generalities:
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of unhappy experiences. . . . These are the tragedies of life. We may grow to include some of them among the trivial incidents of childhood . . . but these, too, as well as the bitter experiences and disappointments of mature years, are the tragedies of life (13-14).
He is trying to deal with his own pain by putting it in the context of human suffering in general, but such intellectualizing merely prevents him from actually dealing with his own personal pain. At the same time, these mental gymnastics are intended to protect him from his pain, which they may do, but they also keep him rom fully living his life emotionally. Ironically, his intellectual efforts to reach self-awareness ultimately turn him into the self-unaware man we find at the end of the book.
The protagonist actually recogni
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Approximate Word count = 1663
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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